Forward the Machine
by baka deshi
Summary: Chapter 7 out! What if the Thule Society had not succeeded in launching their invasion that fateful November 8th? What if Alphonse Elric was still out there, searching? And what if Edward Elric had suddenly...disappeared? AU branching off from midmovie.
1. Chapter 1

**Title:** Forward the Machine - Chapter 01

**Genre:** Action/adventure

**Rating:** R

**Summary:** (AU diverging from mid-movie) What if the Thule Society hadn't opened the Gate on that fateful November 8th? What if Alphonse was still out there, searching? What if Alfons had yet to fire his rocket – but along with his failing health during the day, his nights are fraught with extraordinary dreams, dreams of people and places that he has never been?

And what if Edward Elric...disappeared...

_There was always the lingering sensation of being watched when he came here, though his eyes told him his heart's fears were groundless. Who could be watching, when there was no one here but himself, and nothing around but an endless, waving green sea - meadow grass and other flora stretching out to the horizon, cut through by a river that looked like a long, shining snake._

_The name of the place would never come. Perhaps that was why it bothered him. He knew only that he was in the country side, on the crest of a ridge, and the word for all this welled up and died at the very tip of his tongue, rose and subsided with each gust of sweet, heather-scented breeze. He looked out over rolling hills carpeted in verdant grass, and that river winding through to the edge of the world, and he thought:_ _I have seen this place before.  
_  
_"Alphonse!"_

_Someone was calling out to him. He wheeled around and nearly fell, startled to realize that there was someone else in this place after all. Down the rise, a little to his left, a sunny-haired girl was waving up to him. She had great big eyes, cornflower-blue like his own, and he had the stray thought that indeed, she had grown up beautiful – though a moment ago he would have sworn he had never seen her round, expressive face before in his life._

_"Alphonse!"  
_  
_He tried to call back to her but the greeting stuck in his throat, the same way the name of the place did. He didn't know what her proper name was, nor what he should say to her. His right arm rose of its own volition though, and he felt his throat begin to move, his lips begin to speak. _

_"Hey, Winry!"_

_His voice didn't sound at all right. It was high-pitched and breathy, cracked on the second syllable as if he were thirteen again. He thought he was raising a hand to his throat, but his hand lifted up and then up again past it, extended out to wave. _

_Down below, the girl's eyes shone. "Alphonse!" she cried out joyously, and began to climb up the hill toward him. "There you are! Alphonse!"_

_Alphonse… _

"Alfons!"

Alfons Heiderich started awake in his chair and found himself staring straight into the fleshy expanse that was his supervisor Franz Kessler's jowls.

"Gah!" he started and nearly pitched backwards, chair and all, before he managed to catch himself on a corner of his work bench. "Dr. Kessler!"

"Yes, indeed," Kessler frowned, tilting his head down at Alfons. His entire face quivered when he did so. Kessler was a large man, square and thick, with a curious distribution of corpulence. His chin flowed down from his handlebar moustache as if it were suspended there by magic, endless ripples of puffy pink flesh that terminated in a tight, no-nonsense shirt collar. Miraculously, somehow the works held together by a single collar button. Kessler was not so much a man as a solid section of moving wall, and there were other, less charitable parallels Alfons could draw from that.

Sometimes speaking with an actual wall was less frustrating.

"You were expecting?"

"No one," Alfons lied. His next breath was a little too deep and the sudden influx of chill air seared down in his sore lungs. He coughed discretely into his hand, hoping Kessler wouldn't notice.

His luck, of course, did not hold. "Ah, how is that cough of yours doing?" Kessler asked. "It's been sounding rotten for a while now..."

His small, dark eyes intensified on Alfons, and he sucked in his next breath and held it fast, breathed out slowly through his nose despite that itching, burning feeling in his lungs.

i Please don't let him guess/i he begged, to whatever saints watched over godless dogs and scientists. If Kessler knew...if anyone knew what was really wrong with him...

Kessler clapped a massive hand down on Alfons's shoulder, nearly eclipsing it. His face split into a grin.

"Have to take better care of yourself, my boy," the man announced. "A healthy man is a successful man, as the saying goes." Kessler sucked in a deep breath and thrust his massive chest out proudly, not so subtlety announcing that _he _, at least, was a paragon of health.

Alfons carefully breathed a shallow sigh of relief.

"Yessir," he said obediently, and ducked his head down. "I'll be sure to take care of myself." As if that would do any good.

Kessler drew back and eyed him, massive jowls still jiggling. Alfons swallowed hard. The room he had been given for his office was small, originally an old storage closet; scarcely large enough for his table and chair and notes, let alone Kessler's massive presence. The man dominated even a large space with his personality and size – in an enclosed space like this he was altogether overwhelming.

"I know how easy it is to let ambition run away with you," the man boomed at him. "You are a young man still, I know...and don't think I don't remember the rashness of youth! But Alfons, you cannot neglect yourself and think you are capable of doing your best work."

"I'm not neglecting myself," Alfons protested weakly, though it was no use. Kessler's mind, some of his fellow aeronauts liked to whisper, was like a steel trap – a rusty one. It had the tendency to bite down hard on an idea and never open up again.

"You were passed out on your work table!" Kessler said. "Come now, boy. Get up, go home tonight, get some proper rest. You are no use to the cause if you cannot even think straight."

"My mind is perfectly clear," Alfons muttered under his breath, but he knew when he was bested. There was no arguing with Kessler when he was like this. Kessler's focus (and, to hear him talk, the entire world's as well) was always on the Cause. All for the Cause. The greatest honor was to serve the Cause, the Society, the Society's Causes, on and on ad nauseum, despite the fact that seniority wise, Alfons had been with the organization longer than Kessler. Not that it mattered. Alfons didn't know how to tell him he didn't give a damn what the Thule stood for, only that they were a vehicle through which he could finally carry out a Cause of his own – the culmination of his life's work, the practical demonstration of a rocketship that could carry a human passenger, ahead of all those naysayers in the Americas and Britain and the rest of the world. He intended to prove, once and for all, that German scientists were not backwards, merely unfortunate...and that despite their unfortunate circumstances, his people could design rings around anyone else on the planet.

It was likely to be the only chance he would ever get.

"I really do worry about you sometimes, boy," Kessler said. The blond forests that were his eyebrows knitted, if not in genuine concern, then in a passable fascimile, and Alfons felt a bit bad for feeling so resentful. "Take a couple days off, in fact. Go home and see your family. You act like the devil himself is at your back."

Easy for him to say. The resent was back full force. After the Great War, Alfons no longer had a family, and Edward -- Edward was something he really didn't want to think about right now, because that hurt was still too new, and the guilt was too thick. He held his tongue, smiled up at Kessler instead. Ham-fisted condolences from his supervisor were more than he wanted to bear. He was already ill and angry, and being forced to go home.

"I'll spend the night at home with Miss Greta," Alfons assured Kessler, and the man nodded, looking eminently satisfied with himself.

"Good. See that you do," Kessler said, and turned toward the door. That was the one good thing about his boss, Alfons thought sourly. As pompous and tactless and generally a nuisance as the man could be, he did have a knack for resolving matters quickly. If Kessler were the type to want to sit around and chat all day…Alfons was not given to violence, but he thought he could probably make an exception in that case.

Though this afternoon...Alfons realized belatedly that he had outstanding business with Kessler.

"Ah, by the way!" Alfons called after him.

"Yes?" Kessler paused, one large hand completely obscuring the door knob.

Alfons wet his lips. "About the rocket…have you heard anything about the launch date?"

Kessler tilted his head, considering.

"Not as such, no," he replied. "Though I have it on very good authority that it won't be too much longer."

Annoyingly, he winked.

"Have patience, my boy," he said again – must Alfons go back to being a 'boy'? He had thought that fight was over, when the Society had named him Chief Aerospace Engineer. "Rome was not built in a day."

And another one of the man's obnoxious little proverbs. "Neither was my rocketship," Alfons said, voice a little strained, but if Kessler noticed he gave no sign. He raised a ham-sized fist in salute and then bustled out the door, no doubt off to terrorize someone else.

Alfons slumped back in his chair and finally gave in to the urge to cough. Now that he was free to be alone, he could afford to hack a lung out.

_ If only I actually could _, he thought with dark humor, looking down at the horror in his handkerchief briefly before tossing it away into the rubbish basket next to his desk. He couldn't risk using it again. Blood was a dead give-away, it was one of the great hallmarks of consumption, and as his doctor had cautioned, one of the signs the illness was advanced enough to be contagious. Although it seemed the past week had been better…perhaps because the rocket was finally complete, and the pace of his job had abruptly switched from murderous to down-right idyllic.

Alfons gave a wan smile. As much as it pained him to admit it, perhaps Kessler had the right of it. It had been a while since he slept in his own bed, or had a proper bath, or a dinner that wasn't bread and beer on the assembly floor. And it wasn't that he hadn't had time. His supervisor certainly seemed to find time to eat three square meals a day. Really, how did the man manage to be so huge? Kessler must be awfully rich to afford to be so well-fed, Alfons thought with annoyance.

Or he'd been on the Thule Society's payroll longer than Alfons thought he had, Alfons considered, a nameless bit of disquiet stealing over him. The Thule Society, with some of its members' ties to big countryside farms, was smart enough to pay its employees in food – good food too, bacon and eggs and potatoes, not just the withered produce that the boarding house had been subsisting on. He had thought Miss Gratia might weep when he had brought home his first 'paycheck' from his new sponsors – a whole side of cured pork and real butter, and winter cabbages that were good for more than thin soup. It had paid his back rent, and Edward's, after one meal. Such a godsend, this job was, and yet…

_ There's just something _off, a part of himself kept complaining, and alone, Alfons had a hard time not listening to it. He looked out over the pile of new schematics he had yet to look through and fingered one, considering. The Thule Society was supposed to be sponsoring and showcasing his team's aerospace ventures, right? Then why hadn't they let allowed them to take his rocketcraft outside for testing yet? They had a man willing to be the test pilot – namely, himself. The one good thing about a terminal illness, he considered with a twisted smirk, was that it did put risks into proper perspective. What did it matter if the rocket blew up in his face? He already walked with two ticking time-bombs in his chest. His greatest concern was that he live long enough to test his invention, period.

But whenever he asked Kessler, or anyone else at the Society for that matter, just when the launch was going to happen, all he ever got was 'soon'. 'Not long now'. 'Just be patient'. And so far he'd grinned and born it...but eventually, he was going to run out of 'soons'.

Alfons sighed and scrubbed a hand through his unruly mop of hair, then set about tidying his desk as best he could. He swept the top layer of papers into a satchel and gave everything else a cursory once-over, honestly not sure what he should be taking with him, if he should be taking something with him. He wasn't even solid on what he was working on right now. Their main prototype was just barely finished - not even tested! - but the Thule Society had already requested him to design more rocketkraft...larger, faster, and most bizarre of all, they had assured him that fuel would not be an issue.

"We're close to a breakthrough," Kessler had said to him privately, after Alfons had promised to keep it in confidence. "There's a new method...the society should be able to liquefy all the oxygen you need, don't worry about efficiency. Design the largest vessel you can to accommodate the greatest payload possible, and we'll take care of the rest."

"Sure they will," Alfons muttered darkly, looking out over his tiny little makeshift office, the single lamp jerry-rigged to give him light. He turned it off and headed for door, coughed briefly into his hand.

He looked at the soiled, bloodied handkerchief lying in the rubbish bin and kicked it into the corner.

He really didn't have time for this.

* * *

He picked up a sack of vegetables for Miss Gratia on his way out of the laboratory and requested a car to take him to the train station. Haushofer's villa was an amazing place in Alfons's eyes – despite being situated outside the city proper, in a vale in a so-called suburb that was more than half wild, they had more here than most people living at the heart of Munich herself did. Old money, it seemed, had deep pockets, or at least more resilience than the common mark. The complex was a veritable fortress, sprawling out to include a sizeable garden space and some farm land in addition a vast garage for motor cars, and an indoor atrium large enough to play host to a rocketcraft.

One of said motor cars puttered up exactly on schedule, and a professional though unsmiling driver stepped out to usher Alfons in. Alfons gave the word, and they pulled away smoothly, his hands clasped tightly around the handle to his work satchel, marveling as always at the strange turn of fate that had earned him chauffers as a replacement for his totalled car. The car that Edward had totalled seemed years away.

"I can take you as far as the station," the driver informed him once they were clear of the gates. "You'll have to take the train into the city on your own."

Alfons nodded. Security had tightened again, he noticed with concern. Two men with guns at the gate, instead of just one.

"Something going on?" he asked as they passed, pointing back at the young men standing stiffly with their rifles. They looked like ex-military types, from the set of their faces and the natural way they held their weapons, ready and alert.

The driver's sour face twisted into something even more unpleasant.

"Dangerous times," he said simply. "It is best for us all to keep a low profile. When the deposition failed us…" He trailed off and glared at the road, and Alfons nodded slowly. The man meant the coup that had just recently almost-happened, the demise of which seemed to have left many without mooring or direction. He hadn't been in Munich the night it happened because he'd been too close to finishing with his baby to be anywhere but the laboratory. His November 8th had been spent riveting the last of her hull together and then he'd slept right where he fell, too tired to be concerned with tripe like politics. It was only much later he'd learned, to his considerable surprise, that Officer Hughes and his goofball buddies had actually made good on all that idle beerhouse chatter. The Socialist Worker's Party had indeed risen up, just like Hughes was always waxing poetic about – and they had been beaten back down, their forces scattered, their leaders arrested. If Alfons had the energy to expend on the tumultuous world of politics, he might have almost thought it tragic. Something had to change, and the current government was certainly not up to it. The fact that he was holding his salary in turnip-form was proof of the pudding.

Interesting how so many of the Party were finding their way to the Thule Society of late, though. Kessler liked to go on about that, how the Thule were doing great things for Germany, how the Worker's Party would be foolish indeed to ignore what they had to offer. Always before, Alfons had dismissed it as irrelevant gossip. But to actually see the ranks swell, new faces flitting about the motor pool and shop floor…it made him wonder.

"You are a socialist, then?" Alfons asked the driver, probing a little. "I don't think I've seen you around."

The driver shot him a sharp look in response, his dark eyes like fire on Alfons's cheeks. He would be a handsome man, really, if not for the thunderclouds hanging over his head.

"I take it you aren't?"

"I didn't say that," Alfons said quickly. God in heaven, those eyes were fierce. "I am with the Society, that's where my focus lies currently." Technically not a lie, though not the whole truth either. To explain why politics didn't matter to him would be to explain that he was fated for something far less grand than revolutions and medals, and likely only hasten his ultimate end. If Kessler – or anyone else in the Thule Society, which preached almost as if weakness was itself an assault on morality – realized that he was a closet consumptive, they would not welcome him back from this little vacation with open arms. They would direct him to the nearest sanatorium, and that would be where he would finish his life – surrounded by doctors and white walls, and he would likely never know if his baby, his blood, sweat, and tears, lifted off.

Or if Edward had seen fit to forgive him.

The driver seemed satisfied with that answer though, lending weight, again, to the notion that the Thule name counted for something in the ranks of the Worker's Party.

"As does mine," the man admitted. "Only just come aboard after the march – after it all went to hell, nobody was willing to step up but Haushofer and his lot." The man waved a hand expansively – a hand missing two fingers, Alfons suddenly noticed. He tried to look as if he weren't staring. Even living with Edward and his amazing detachable limbs had never made it any easier. The eye was simply drawn to gaps in the human body. It was human nature to notice when something that should be there wasn't.

He didn't want to think about how ironic that was, and so, he didn't.

The driver was still talking. "A man comes to appreciate leadership, I think. I served two years in the War…that's where I lost these…" – and now he had his disfigured hand right in Alfons's face, and Alfons turned what he hoped was a respectful shade of pale – "and after that, I learned there's some that fight by talking, and some that talk by fighting, and what this world needs is somebody smart enough to do both." He gave Alfons a conspiratorial grin and waggled his few remaining fingers. "How about you?"

"They hired me to do some construction work," Alfons hedged, careful not to give away too many details about what exactly it was he was constructing and why. Until they went public with their invention ( _and the Thule Society had _promised _they would help him, that they would use their university connections to help him promulgate his triumph_), it was as much to his benefit to keep the secret under wraps as to the Society. "Afraid I can't tell you much more than that. You know the drill – orders are orders, eh? The brass says leap and you frog right into the frying pan."

And a calculated allusion to past military history despite the fact that – as much as it pained him sometimes – he had been too young and too well-to-do to go to war for his country during the Great War. He had understood his father's reasoning at the time...he was young and in the middle of his education, and hell, everyone had thought the war would be over straight-aways. They had talked about the troops being home by Christmas, and so the neighbor ladies had all planted victory gardens and waited for a feast that in the end, never came.

Now his father was gone, along with most of the rest of his friends and blood relatives, and Alfons had learned it was not wise to let others know that he'd survived the war at a boarding school.

He did feel a bit bad about misleading the driver so grievously. It was clear the man was so eager for commraderie that he'd gone hook, line and sinker for Alfons's feeble bait. The driver cracked his first real smile since Alfons had met him and thumped the steering wheel, chuckling out loud.

"Ah, yes, I catch your meaning." He winked at Alfons and then shook his head. "Higher-ups always know best, don't they? Even when you've dug so deep you might as well be diggin' your own damn grave, and they keep telling you it's not enough, you have to keep working on them trenches." He sobered instantly then, face snapping back into his previous sneer. "Not that I mean to question, mind. Just that I understand - we regular Joes, we don't get the information that lets us know why they do the things they do, you know?"

"Of course," Alfons said. The man seemed a bit anxious, he noted. His fingers were tight against the steering wheel.

"Funny," the man said, his voice a little rough. "To think, once upon a time, I was going to be an officer."

He didn't say anything after that, just drove, and Alfons didn't press him. Whatever horrors the man had seen, it seemed he wished to keep them to himself. Alfons leaned his arm against the side of the car and concentrated on breathing, slow and steady so as not to cough too often.

They arrived at the station and parted ways, Alfons with his satchel and sack of vegetables, and the driver even smiled again as he waved good-bye. He really was handsome when he did so, after all.

"You should smile more," Alfons muttered as the automobile pulled away back onto the street, but if the man heard, he did not acknowledge it. Alfons bought a ticket to the city, and boarded a train for home.

* * *

Despite the upheaval of the past few weeks, it seemed little had ultimately changed about the part of town Miss Gratia's boarding house was in. The main drag was its usual contained chaos, motor cars and lorries and bicycles and pushcarts all jockeying for position, and Officer Hughes at the corner smack dab in the middle of it, yelling out directions. Alfons, on foot, snuck down through a back alley and around through a residential district, to finally arrive at the back of Gratia's flower shop and let himself in through the side door.

"Good evening?" he called hopefully from the foyer, holding the sack of vegetables out in front of him.

"Ah, Alfons!" Gratia's pleasant alto sang forth from direction of the kitchen. "Hold on, I'll be right there."

Alfons did as he was told, pacing idly about the common area while he waited. The widow's house must have once been a truly splendid place. It was apparent in the lines of the wainscoting, the pristine, glossy oak floorboards. Even though the furniture in it had largely been sold off piece by piece due to the inflation, it was still obvious that the house itself was lovely and well-cared for. Alfons had never seen it in its heyday, but he could imagine Gratia had kept things just as impeccable before she'd started taking in boarders like him -- the woman was sweet but very fierce where proper housekeeping was concerned. The only time he had ever seen his landlady raise her voice, in fact, was the night Edward had stomped his way across the parlor with muddy boots. "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned", so they said, but after that incident Alfons's money was "on a woman who's just waxed the floorboards". Even lackadaisical Edward had remembered to wipe his feet after that.

His stomach twisted a bit and he paused, suddenly nervous. He wondered, not for the first time, if Edward had seen fit to forgive him yet.

Gratia appeared through the kitchen doorway, looking tired, but she was still smiling as always. Her smile brightened even more when she saw what Alfons was carrying. She was a plain, mature woman, with brown hair in a matronly that clung stubbornly about her cheeks like a silky shield, but her expressions were gentle and worth the effort it took to make them out beneath her hairdo. Time and hardship had aged her prematurely, but she still clung to the vestiges of her former class. Her husband had been a banker before he'd perished in the war, and she wore pearls with her aprons and gardeners' gloves. Alfons had once asked her, hesitantly, why she didn't give those fineries up, rather than parting with her furniture, and the woman had simply shook her head and told him that there were some things a Lady could not put a price on. That was also why, she said demurely, she had yet to marry again.

"Good evening, Alfons," Gratia said. "How have you been?"

"Fine," Alfons lied. He hoisted the brown paper sack higher. "I've brought you this week's rent."

"Oh, bless your heart!" Gratia said. She took the vegetables from him and began to inspect them. "Just in time, I was needing a potato or two for this soup." She looked up. "Dinner should be ready in another half an hour. Shall I call you?"

"Please," Alfons said, though in truth he was beginning to feel more fatigued than hungry. Just riding the train into the city had taken it out of him, its rattling sway almost leaving him dizzy. Maybe Kessler was right, he considered. Maybe he had been working himself too hard.

Or maybe he just didn't have much time left.

Gratia nodded and turned back toward the kitchen, groceries in hand, then paused and looked back over her shoulder at him. Her brow knotted.

"By the way, Alfons..." she said, and he knew in an instant that his earlier hopes were about to be dashed. "Do you have any laundry that needs doing? I went up earlier but Edward wasn't in, so I didn't want to intrude. Surely you two have some built up though. It's been a while."

"I'll bring it down later," Alfons promised. "And..." he swallowed hard. "You haven't seen Edward at all this week then, I take it?"

"No?" Gratia looked a bit puzzled. "I thought he was with you, at your work."

"Ah, not as such, no," Alfons said. He licked his lips, not sure how he should explain. He had never actually told their landlady that Edward had given up on being gainfully employed, for fear that she would misunderstand their situation. "Tell you what - if you see him, would you mind telling him I'd like to talk to him? We um, had a falling out a while back. If he's not been here, it's likely because of me," he concluded glumly.

Gratia's mouth rounded into a small 'o' of surprise. "Oh, I didn't know...I'm sorry to hear that." She rallied immediately though, and gave him a motherly pat on the arm. "You two are good friends, though. I'm sure it'll blow over."

"I hope so," Alfons said. He was feeling a familiar tightness in his chest, one not entirely born of illness. He bid his landlady good evening and started slowly mounting the stairs to their rooms, not at all to get there now that he knew for certain they'd be vacant.

"It'll all blow over," hah, as if he hadn't told himself that lie before. Alfons shook his head. He had kept hoping, those last few months, that whatever was eating the man might just work itself through naturally -- Edward had been so enthusiastic about their project when they'd started, his insights were at the heart of the rocketship's design. They had argued about it occasionally, but for the most part Alfons had bit his tongue when Edward had announced he was leaving the team. Surely once the ship was built his melancholy would lift, Alfons had though. Surely, it all would pass.

In the end though, Edward's depressed mood had only gotten worse, and more and more outwardly obvious, until even Herr Tucker and his oblivious boozehound buddies had pulled Alfons aside to talk about it. It was their opinion, they relayed in whispered tones, that the poor fellow was probably shell-shocked, like so many others who had come home from that horrid war, and they had urged Alfons to treat his roommate with care. They didn't even know the half of it. Edward was missing two limbs, a fact that he kept a tight secret because he had experimental prosthetics in their place -- 'trade secrets', he'd admitted to Alfons when Alfons had asked how they worked. His father was developing them and that was the best Alfons had ever gotten. The same father who had subsequently disappeared one day and left no note or forwarding address, and caused Alfons to end up with Edward and his creepy box of false limbs, his crazy delusions, stories about folk heroes told as if they were reality until Alfons got the uncomfortable notion that maybe the man really didn't understand where he was and what he was doing sometimes. And he _did_ care about Edward -- cared more in some ways, he was afraid, than was probably healthy -- but he himself was only human. The last night he'd spent at the boarding house before completing his rocket, in some ways the most important night of his life to date...and Edward had just wandered around the house after him, nagging him not to go to the construction site, because he had nebulously learned that the Thule Society was Evil. This of course, after he had showed up at dinner saying he'd met his baby brother (whom Alfons suspected was probably dead, though Edward seemed to cling to the notion that someday they'd meet again), and carrying a knight's helmet that Alfons could only hope wasn't stolen. He cared about the man, to the point where he felt like he was going crazy sometimes too, but damn it all -

His hand tightened on the hand rail of the stairs and he wheezed a little, the tightness intensifying within his chest. He could justify it all he wanted but in the end...hell. He had _hit_ the man, right here on these very stairs, hit a poor, crippled, defenseless man and screamed at him, and the look on Edward's face...at the time, he had relished it, Edward realizing just how his constant inanity was driving Alfons nuts, but in retrospect, he wasn't proud of that one bit. As exasperating as Edward was, it wasn't his fault he was broken. He had looked so...startled and lost, like a puppy suddenly turned on by its master, and Alfons realized in hindsight that what he'd really wanted to do was just pick him up and hold him, pet on him until the madness went away. He was only human though, and he had given into his rage at having to deal with it at all, and now Edward was gone, and it looked more and more like he might not be coming back.

Alfons let himself into their rooms and smelt stale air, dust circulating. Gratia only came in to clean when her boarders were home to allow her. For the room to be this dusty, no one had been in here for days.

"Hello?" he called, just in case.

The walls echoed his voice back to him, and Alfons leaned hard back against the door.

He took his supper upstairs, washed up only perfunctorily, and after that went straight in to bed. He would go back in to Haushofer's villa tomorrow, he decided.

He curled up in the center of his bed, coughing slightly to himself, and prayed, as always, simply for the both of them to wake up and be safe the next day, no matter where they might be.

* * *

Sleep was rather long in coming, but when it did take him, it was with a vengeance. Alfons fell hard and was only gradually aware, sometime later, that he was starting to dream.

That had been happening to him more and more lately, to be asleep and yet aware of that fact, aware that he could look around and know that what he was seeing was part of a dream. He'd had so many of these visions lately he couldn't begin to recount them all, but a disproportionate number seemed to center around a tangle of fields that he swore he'd never seen, a green smudge of river valley and little farm houses and dales that he, a born and bred city dweller, scarcely cared about in waking. He blamed that solidly on Edward and his over-active imagination. Alfons had no doubt that somewhere out there was a tiny little hovel that had given rise to the oddity that was Edward Elric; he merely doubted it was in another dimension. His words were compelling though, Alfons had to hand him that. Before Edward, he had never had such immersive and memorable fantasies.

Tonight he did not find himself in the midst of a lush river valley though; instead, his mind's eye was full of sun, sand, windswept dunes. _Desert_, he identified, although in waking he had only heard of them academically. It was a strange, alien landscape too bright with a shade of yellow that somehow disturbed him. It didn't feel real enough. He sank down on top of the swell of a dune and shut his eyes, blinded. He did not like this place.

_ I never much cared for the desert _ the knowledge was simply there, not a musing but an axiom. _Too much sand gets in my brother's joints and they freeze up. And I sink.  
_  
On waking it was the kind of sentiment he would ignore as dream-thought, or more often, just forget. He had had a fuzzier dream once in which he had felt elated, ecstatic to have discovered the solution to inflation. Upon awakening, he had retained only the nonsense phrase "it starts with the bonds maturing". Dreams meant nothing.

Except when they were about Edward. He was aware that was what he was searching for, Edward; he had what seemed like a bucket and pail in his hands all of sudden (or perhaps they had always been there? things were so impermanent like that). Had to dig. Somewhere in this crazy, shifting golden noise was the true gold, Edward's high-colored hair and eyes, and there was a horrible sense of urgency. If he didn't shovel fast enough, perhaps Edward might drown. Perhaps he already had. Perhaps perhaps perhaps...

_ He left because of me. _ His earlier fears, but sounded out in a higher, more youthful mental voice. _It is my fault that he's gone. Now I can't find him... _ He shoveled faster, harder, deeper, terrified. The sands were hot and shifted over his legs and feet, started prickling unbearably. He was going under--

--and then the dream shifted, and they were back in his rooms, though it was all still quiet and no one was saying a word. No one was saying a word, but Edward was sitting in his usual chair observing him gravely. It wasn't clear if this was his bedroom or the downstairs dining room. With dreamscape, it was somehow both at once.

_ i Please, I missed you/i _ he cried out silently, in that same boyish tone. For some reason, he didn't seem to be looking down at Edward like he normally would. Perhaps he was small himself? He hadn't sounded like this to himself since he was just hitting puberty.

Edward said nothing, merely stared at him, face shadowed. At the same time, he had the solid and very real remembrance of what it was like to have the back of his hand connect with that pretty face. The sound of Edward, falling, that sickening thud against the stair.

There was a sudden, immediate feeling of regret, and he wanted to fall to his knees. He watched in a detached sort of way as his body did just that, though somehow the perspective remained unaffected. It was sometimes that way in the land of dreams.

_ I didn't mean what I said _ he cried, and his voice was his own this time._ I screamed at you, and I'm sorry. I just hoped you would be happy for me...  
_  
The shadowed figure remained silent.

I never meant for you to leave.

_ I didn't want you to leave because of me, either ,_ his younger-voice echoed faintly, only he was aware now that it wasn't his voice at all. He looked to his side to see a boy kneeling beside him, a boy who looked very much like him when he had been that age -- thirteen? fourteen? -- but somehow he suddenly knew that this was not himself at all. It wasn't just the brown hair and hazel eyes, it was something more fundamental than that.

Something_other_.

Their eyes met briefly, and his smaller self started, blinked. Gave him an eerie look, which even later on waking Alfons would find stuck with him.

_Wait - who are you?_

The dream shattered and Alfons woke, coughing so hard it was amazing he didn't spit out a lung.


	2. Chapter 2

Risenburg in winter was not the paradise he remembered, Alphonse thought, tugging his red coat tighter across his chest. In his mind's eye, his hometown was a green place, fragrant with heather, and the hills perennially blazed with warm midsummer sun – the same sanctuary it had always been, where he and his brother could race endlessly through the lush river valley, maybe find a fat frog to take home and show Mother.

The Risenburg of late November, however, was nothing remotely like his memories and he was kicking himself for not considering a thicker coat. His brother's old clothing was layered enough that the temperature itself didn't bother him, but the bitter, howling wind sweeping down through the train yard had a way of weaseling in around the edges. He had pulled the floppy hood of his red coat up to protect his ears but that did nothing for his cheeks. They were like wax-polished apples, a bright, unhealthy red, and throbbed dully with each new scouring gust.

"Hey Al, are you coming or not!?"

Winry's voice echoed around the corner of the station, a slight edge to it that he knew had nothing to do with the crummy weather. The Risenberg depot was a small train yard, and passenger and freight and letter-mail traffic alike was routed to this single station open only a few hours a day, leaving a precious narrow window of opportunity to rescue parcels and post. Because he'd woken up so late, as she'd kept reminding him on the drive down, they were nearly out of time to retrieve her precious shipment from Rush Valley.

As he kept reminding her, he didn't understand why she couldn't just go without him, and that had fueled the terseness between them to brand new heights today.

"On my way!" he said, trying to sound valiant, tugged his hood tighter down around his ears. The wind merrily retaliated by trying to sheer off his nose instead, but he did his best to ignore it. He didn't _want_ to be in a bad mood, he didn't _want_ to be mad at Winry. It was the weather and the circumstance, he told himself. Too much cold seeping into his bones, compared to the desert's searing heat.

A torn timetable flapped merrily on the stationmaster's door, a little yellow flag beckoning out to him, and he was powerless against its crinkly siren's voice. He looked once toward his destination and then hung a sharp right, pressed the ripped page flat and tried to make sense of it.

To his relief, the relevant information was there. The wind had torn it nearly in half but the tacks at the corners had kept the pieces from flying away. The next train to Lior was due on Tuesday…another Thursday…again next Sunday…

"Al!"

Al started and nearly shredded the schedule further as he jerked in Winry's direction. She was poking her head around the bend to glare at him, her full lips pursed in a brilliant pout. A lot of Winry had filled out in the years he couldn't remember, of course, but it felt like she'd changed even more in the few months since he'd last seen her. He didn't remember her being so Motherly, either physically or emotionally.

"What are you doing?! C'mon, we've only got ten minutes, I need help with this pallet!" That tone even made him feel like a recalcitrant child, and the brisk manner in which she turned away shamed him for not following in step.

"Sorry!" he yelped and started trotting after her instinctively, before his higher logic kicked back in. He stopped dead in his tracks, balled his hands into fists. The looks that she gave him might sometimes remind him of his mother, but the schedule whipping behind him made him think of his brother, and he knew without a doubt which one he would choose.

Al doubled back and clapped his hands together, let the energy spiral out and weave the paper fibers once more into a solid whole. He admired it for a second, then sullied his achievement by tearing the schedule down at the corners and stuffing it wholesale into his jacket pocket. He could take the timetable home and plot his plan of attack later. Right now, he needed to help Winry before she made good on her usual playful threat to brain him with a wrench.

He trotted around the corner as fast as he could manage with the headwind, its icy needles making his eyes sting. Thankfully, the freight storage area had a high fence around it that warded against some of its violence.

"Sorry, that wind is sure fierce," he said as he entered, mimicking Gramma Pinako. "'Thought my ol' bones were gonna freeze.'"

Winry looked up from the wooden pallet she was kneeling beside and rolled her eyes.

"Your 'old bones' better get down here and help take these straps off, if they don't want to be broken." She gestured at the heavy tethers securing her shipment down. It was a veritable mountain of crates, most of them marked FROM RUSH VALLEY.

"C'mon, it's not going to kill you to be out for five minutes, it's just a little chilly."

"A 'little' chilly!? I don't see why you're not _freezing_ !" Al complained. In accordance with her alien adult-ness, Winry had taken to wearing odd things, skirts and leggings and buckled boots that only came up to mid-calf. He would have thought her knees would be turning blue.

"I'm used to it," she said simply. "Of course, I wasn't in Lior for all of fall festival."

"…I thought we were through with that," Al sighed. He came over to 'their' pallet reluctantly, eyed the boxes and boxes of waiting automail parts.

"We are. I'm just saying, you're not in the desert anymore. Now come on, help me get this hook off."

Al nodded warily and complied, tugging down on the nylon tether to give Winry enough leeway to wiggle the hook at the bottom off the pallet. He sincerely doubted that the festival issue was really over, but what could he even say? It was true he hadn't been home for their regional harvest festival. Same had gone for the year before. It was a tradition he found sweet but out-dated, and it wasn't like any of them were big into the agricultural community.

_If you just want to have family dinner, we can do it when I get back. We can even have sausage and pumpkin, I can buy some in Central. That's all we ever do at the festival anyway, go and eat at the food stands_ he'd said then, and Winry had still argued with him. Gramma Pinako, on the other hand, had said nothing outright, but she'd stood in the background and quietly Disapproved nonetheless. In a way, that bothered him more.

_Certain people need to learn to compromise_, he thought, tore off straps with savage intensity. He was already visiting every chance he could spare. He was writing letters home, he was being conscientious. And yet, they behaved as though he were the one being unreasonable…like they were only giving lip service to supporting his search. Their actions made it clear that they'd rather keep him home.

Al buckled down, hauled boxes, attempted not to stew to death in his own juices.

_I _ saw _brother. I saw him and_ talked _to him_ . Not for very long, not about any of the important things -- _IloveyouI'vemissedyouhowthehellcanIfindyou_ -- but his brother was alive, just like he had dreamed. And his family was keeping him from going back to Lior to the site of that strange disturbance, simply because they hadn't seen what he'd seen.

He plunked the last box down into the trunk, shut it and leaned forward against the chill, punishing steel of the trunk lid.

_It's hard enough to hope without having to share it around,_ Al thought, pressing his forehead. Closed his eyes, let the cold bring focus. _Brother, just give me the strength to keep moving forward._

"…Al?" Winry's voice was right in his ear all of a sudden and he started, jerked fully upright once more. She was staring at him with worry in her eyes. Perhaps even a little wariness.

"Are you okay?"

"Yeah." Al rubbed his eyes, which had started to sting from the cold. "Just…tired." _Of everything, some days.  
_  
"Are you sleeping all right?" Winry's voice was all patient concern, saintly, motherly tones, and again it aggravated him.

"If it's too cold in your room I can check the furnace vent."

"It's fine."

Al checked the latch on the trunk and then went around to the passenger's side of the car, waited for Winry to unlock it.

"Actually, it does get pretty cold at night in the desert…" Al said by way of conversation. "I just never went outside much then. The people live in the most interesting clay houses – you'd think they'd bake, you know, since you always hear about cooking food in 'clay ovens', but the mix of soils the Ishval use is actually very slow to absorb heat. It's a great insulator, if I'd had more time I'd have brought a sample back for you. Maybe you could use it in the workshop somehow."

"Mm," was all Winry said. She climbed into the driver's seat and put the car in gear, quite clearly not actually paying attention. Al bit back the urge to comment that he'd hoped she'd appreciate him showing an interest in what _she_ did. Just because he'd gained the knowledge out in Lior…was it going to be taboo forever? Was he never going to be allowed to think of the place again? The train schedule in his pocket weighed heavy, infuriated him more. He'd bet good money if she knew, she'd take it away from him.

"I had another dream last night," he said instead, swinging his legs idly over the edge of the tall passenger's side seat.

Winry's eyes flicked to the right, lingered on his face despite the icy roads. It was snowing again and here and there, little patches were starting to stick.

"Did you now?" she said. There was a terse note to her voice even though she looked back ahead, feigning that everything was normal. Al watched her out of the corner of his eye, saw her grip tighten on the steering wheel.

"Yeah," he said, pursuing the opening. "I saw brother again in those same Drachman clothes. The brown tweed, you remember?" The same strange outfit that so far no one had been able to confirm his brother even owned. Al had checked through his brother's old dry-cleaning, his personal effects once the military had released them. He could only assume it was a fashion Ed had picked up in the land he was trapped in.

"You told me about that one, yes." Winry's voice had risen another octave, had a high, thin vibrato. Her nostrils flared. He knew he was upsetting her and he tried to tell himself he didn't care, damn it all -- sometimes he had to let it out, whether they wanted him to or not.

"There was something different this time," he said. "Maybe a new clue. I think I saw--" He paused to wrinkle his nose. This was the part he was less sure of, the part that had left him staring at the ceiling long after he should have fallen back asleep.

"I think I saw Him." Always a capital 'H' in his mind, always a capital 'O'ther for the stranger whose eyes he watched his brother through. "He looks…rather different than I expected. Kind of hang-dog." He'd spent a portion of those awake hours in the middle of the night trying to come up with the perfect description; he was rather proud of 'hang-dog'. "He has floppy hair, like it hasn't been cut for a while. Kind of thin. He's really pale, kind of sickly, and his eyes are the same color as yours—his hair too—"

"Al!" Winry's voice snapped like a bead of spun glass, a thin thread pulled out beyond its endurance.

"What?"

"Would you listen to yourself?!"

"Well, I'm _sorry_ !" he hissed back, though something twisted at the pit of his stomach. Guilt had finally arrived with its usual afterburn of nausea. Also, frustration. "It's a dream about brother, I wanted to tell you about it!"

"That's all you do since you came home," she accused. She made a savage right-turn and something shifted in the trunk; the car lurched hard to the outside. "Day in, day out. You talk about these things like they're real."

"Because they—might be," he said, only narrowly avoiding the word 'are'. "How many times do I have to tell you, the facts fit?! When I talked with him at Lior, he had the same clothes as he does in my dreams. He said it was another world. What I see in my dreams—it isn't anywhere on Amestris, Winry. I know…I've looked."

Winry scowled at the road like she expected it to throw them, looked over at Al the same way. The windshield wipers clicked back and forth like accusations, tsk-tsk, tsk-tsk.

"That's the part I have problems with, Al," she said. "You talk about that armor like it was real, but there's no proof that wasn't some kind of dream, either. You put so much stock in this…"

Anger surged, eradicated any vestiges of guilt at making her worry.

"Well, what am I supposed to put stock in, when my own family won't believe me!"

"Believe what?!" Winry slapped her hand down on the dash control, kicked up the windshield wipers until they were screaming, an overkill response to the few flurries kissing the windshield. "Al, they shipped you home from Lior in a _coma_, what were we supposed to think!? You were out cold for two days and then the first thing out of your mouth was you wanted to go right back there. It doesn't sound sane, okay? There, I said it!"

"You weren't there," he said through gritted teeth. It felt like every muscle in his jaw had frozen up, in his fury he could barely speak. "I know it sounds crazy, we've been over that. It was a major alchemical event! Rose can tell you, we were both at ground zero when it happened."

Winry's foot pushed harder on the accelerator. He could hear the engine rev as their speed increased sharply up a steep hill.

"Rose also told us you tried to throw yourself into it." Her voice was tight now, angry – and fearful, he realized. Her eyes were unusually bright. "She said she had to hold you down to keep you from going with those things back to wherever they came from, and after that, you collapsed. Al…"

A hitch in her breath, though whether it was an angry sob or sheer sadness he could not guess.

"You're not the only one who misses Ed. I want to believe he's alive too, don't think that I don't. But this is just crazy."

"Well, if you want to find him, you've got a lousy way of showing it," he ground out. It was like poison, the words bit at his tongue and he had to spit them out, or risk having them destroy him. "I sent a piece of my soul through, I saw the other side of that gate. Do I have to demonstrate for you again!? It doesn't get more eyewitness than a piece of me physically IN another world, why can't you guys get that he's really alive out there—"

"That's not it!" she snarled, hit the dashboard with a fist. In frustration she was always terrifying, physically expressive to the point of swinging fists, wrenches. "What's crazy is how you two throw away everything, everything you have! I know you don't remember, I've tried to hold it in, but I'm so, so sick of seeing you two destroy yourselves for each other!"

"Winry—"

"We've been keeping you home because we're trying to protect you, because we _love_ you, when will you get over it? I know you don't remember all of what you two went through, maybe that's your excuse, but I remember for you. And I can't watch you go through that again, Al, I can't. I can't."

She rubbed furiously at the corners of her eyes and stared out hard at the road, blinking every couple of seconds, organic wipers beating in time to the metal ones screeching against the car's windshield.

For a brief moment, a flashbulb went off inside of his memory, lit up a time where previously there had only been darkness.

_You two won't cry, so I'll have to cry for you. _

All the anger drained out of him, leaving nothing but a cold, sick feeling deep in his chest.

"…I'm sorry," he said quietly, feeling awful. "Sometimes, I think I forget…how much I really don't remember."

"I know," she said. Her voice was shaky. For long moments she just drove, staring straight ahead into the ice and snow, shifting gears every so often. "That's why I want to be here. To remind you to be careful."

Al just nodded, closed his eyes against the tears glistening at the edges of hers. His late teacher's voice was in his head now too, berating him, mocking his foolishness.

_All is one and one is all…what affects the one also affects the all. _

"I'm sorry," he said again. It was the only thing he could say.

"We do support you, Al," she said. "For the record." All the fight had gone out of her; she was concentrated on the road. "I just want you to know…we'll support you if you don't find him, too. No one would ever, ever say you haven't tried. I just…I don't want to lose you too."

She went silent after that, and Al said nothing either. There was a chill in his bones that the heater couldn't chase, a light missing from her eyes that he couldn't rekindle. _I'll find him_ he thought, but for once the words wouldn't form on his tongue. They were frozen inside, much like his tears.

He just watched the snowflakes hit the window shield and vanish without a trace.

* * *

Winry disappeared shortly after they got home and unloaded the car, which was all right with him. He knew she wasn't angry at him, not anymore, but they both needed space. Maybe reorganizing her already meticulous workspace was Winry's way of getting it. He himself retreated upstairs to the guest room, 'his' room, Gramma kept telling him, whenever he wanted it, as long as he needed it. Al tried his best not to leave personal effects there – everything he owned fit in a suitcase, and he wanted to keep it that way. He compromised by unpacking when he visited, but every now and again he felt the need to put everything back in, just to assure himself he could leave if he had to, within the half-hour, if someone called with a lead, a sighting, a fresh contact, anything.

It was one of those days today.

He flopped down on his bed next to his suitcase once it was packed and closed his eyes, trying to collect his thoughts now that he'd collected his things. The next train to Lior left in thirty-six hours. Thirty-six hours to convince his family that no, he wasn't going crazy.

Maybe another demonstration of what he was coming to call his soul alchemy would help...or maybe that wouldn't make a whit of difference. Winry and Pinako had seemed less than thrilled at the knowledge that his consciousness could easily leave his body; his master had outright forbidden it. So as much as it had cut him when she had sent him away, in a certain light the past two months had been great. The Ishval's Art held promise, he could see it in even this short a time. The runes in his memory had to be a part of it...they had the same form, followed all the right ley lines. Every time he put his soul into something he could see them in his mind's eye, and when he'd transferred himself into those strange humanoid monsters in Lior, he had seen the layout proper, the way it was Supposed to Be. Only the Ishvals' art incorporated the human body like that, running lines of power throughout the entire body as though limbs and and head were part of the array. So far no one had been able (or willing) to source it, but he was certain once they did...

_Lior is the key_, the insistent, persistent thought kept screaming at him. _It started in Lior._

And now Lior had been the victim of one of the most unusual invasions in history, fueled by an array that he had unfortunately not been able to see ( _and how much would he give to have made it to the cantina just a few moments earlier? More than he was willing to admit._i ) but that others had assured him was terrifying, grand, disrupted huge swaths of the plaza. It all connected, this vague memory of runes and Lior, and now armors with his soul in them, one of which had made it through a hole in the sky itself to an invisible other world, where his brother _lived_ .

He fingered the schedule still in his jacket pocket and turned over onto his side, holding onto it like a talisman. One way or another, he was going to get back there. Rose and Mr. Armstrong may have shipped him home, but they had no say as to whether he stayed.

He had been under 'medical observation' long enough. Come Tuesday, he was leaving on that train, whether Gramma and Winry liked it or not.

Al curled up in a ball next to his suitcase and attempted to get some shut-eye. He was still exhausted from waking up in the middle of the night last night, and as long as he had the chance, he should probably try to catch up on his rest. If he did have to hoof it down to the train station on foot Tuesday morning, he would have to set out before it was light. And to avoid suspicion, he would have to go to bed at his usual late hour Monday night, which would be even worse if he were already sleep deprived.

Really it would be better if he could just convince them, but he wasn't sure he could bank on that. He'd been trying for days now already, and what had it gotten him? Anger, frustration...and Winry's tears, three things he was certain he didn't want to go through again. If there was one wish he could have come true - besides getting his brother back- it would be for no one else to be hurt.

_You two won't cry, so I'll have to cry for you. _

That same half-memory chased itself around and around in his head, a faint, restless ghost just clear enough to haunt him. He settled in deeper into the mattress, but unfortunately, somehow sleep was proving impossible despite his fatigue.

He kept drifting in and out of consciousness, jerking back awake whenever something bugged him -- the creak of . He kept thinking he felt sand all over his bedspread, a familiar, invisible itch tickling his hands and neck, just abrasive enough to be annoying. Probably from the damned suitcase. Out in the desert, sand got into everything, the cracks in his brother's boots, the hinges of his watch and suitcase. He got up and chucked it back onto the floor, picked up the bed sheets and shook them out hard.

Still no good. If anything the prickling had increased. Great, flipping the sheets about must have spread it around. Al said a particularly nasty word and scooped the entire mess up wholesale. He tromped out into the hallway carrying his bedding in front of him, annoyed at the prospect of washing everything just to take a nap, but he would be damned if he slept in grit while at home in river country.

"Gramma?" he called down the stairs, "are you doing laundry? I need-"

The rest of his sentence ended in an alien rasp as something caught in his chest and he coughed, hard. A strange spear of pain lanced its way through his lungs and Al stopped dead in his tracks.

He shifted the linens he was carrying to one arm, pressed his freehand experimentally over the source of the hurt. His skin felt hot…feverish…even to his own touch, even through his clothes.

_No wonder I was so tired this morning. _

"Gramma, I think I'm sick!"

He dropped his armful of blankets right there on the hallway floor and peered anxiously over the banister. Pinako was there at the bottom of the stairs looking up at him from the foyer, her gnarled hands twisting endlessly over and over in a dishtowel--why a dishtowel, he'd thought for sure she was in the shop. He clomped his way heavily down the stairs toward her, leaning on the handrail for support.

"I'm sick," he said again and his voice sounded awful, rough and low and raspy. Damn, he knew he should have worn a heavier coat to the station...but how could he have expected it to set in so quickly? He was right as rain the night before.

Right as rain before he'd shared yet another dream with the Other, the stranger who was always watching his brother and coughing quietly, never feeling at all well.

The stranger whom he was starting to suspect might actually be real.

_Are we sharing this too, now?_

Pinako was just staring at him, watching his labored progress with dark, lidded eyes. She still hadn't said a word yet, and that was somehow the most terrifying part of all.

"That cough doesn't sound right," she said in a strange voice, still turning her dishrag around and around. "Have you had that looked at?"

"N-no, I didn't have it until a few minutes ago."

Pinako turned away to face the drawing room, also known as the waiting room they used to impress clients with. The drawing-out-transactions room, as Winry called it -- always for visitors, never for family.

"It's going to be a hard winter," Pinako said, staring through the open doorway. "I think we'll have to close off the parlor, we need to save heat."

"…excuse me?"

He could feel another cough burbling its way up through his chest with an urgency that terrified him, and Gramma's words weren't helping.

Pinako turned around again, and her dark eyes bored into him like they could see down to his soul.

"I should know, I've been here since the first stone was laid," she said with a deadpan expression. "You best go out and bring your brother in, it's going to get bad."

She pointed north out the skinny foyer window, and what else could he do but to spin around and look? He was starting to realize something wasn't right, something was indeed very, very wrong, but all that paled when he saw a familiar golden head of hair cresting over the rise.

"BROTHER!"

He lunged for the front door like his life depended on it, threw back the deadlock. His lungs burned like twin coals in his chest but he had suffered worse pains._Ed_ , for the love of god, his brother was _right there_, so achingly close he could already feel him in his arms.

"STAY WHERE YOU ARE, I'M COMING TO GET YOU!"

An invisible spray of grit peppered his ankles as he drew the door back, and Al jerked his feet back instinctively, alarmed. Something skittered across the floorboards, so fine he could barely see it, but it reminded of something, something he should recognize.

_Sand? Why sand--_

He was opening the door into a nightmare.

The green hills of Risenberg were sloughing away, a high wind peeling back all the grass and revealing sand, mountains of sand, vast yellow dunes as far as the eye could see. He could feel the heat radiating from the doorstep, matching the heat radiating up from his chest, and Al sank to his knees with a low groan, not caring that the grit was stinging his cheeks.

"It's a dream," he rasped to no one. Slammed a fist down against the fake porch step, howled up at the fake sky. "It's a _fucking dream_ !"

The wind seemed to pick up the epithet and howl it back to him; Al turned and ran back inside, slammed the door on the horror.

Gramma Pinako was gone now, the foyer quiet and dark. A dream, it was just a dream - what did you do when you knew you were dreaming? Al had the frustrated feeling he was supposed to be able to control it now, wasn't that what the experts said? Yet his chest still throbbed with an uncomfortable ache, the raging wind outside refused to stop. Sand was pouring in through the cracks in the front door, the windows. It was starting to accumulate enough to be visible as little ripples of grey all across the foyer floor.

He watched the minature dunes numbly, wondered if eventually the room would fill and he'd drown. Maybe that meant he could finally wake up then. There was no furniture to stop its progression into the drawing room; they'd sold off the parlor furniture long ago for food, save for one ratty sofa which not even the pawnshops would take, and so they had by necessity kept.

_Wait... _

He heard a noise on the stairs and looked up to see a stranger coming down, a dark-skinned girl in long woolen dress. She looked like Rose, if Rose were thinner and her eyes were dead. He knew Rose had seen hard times in her life (_like her son, the one named after his brother_ ), but this girl...her eyes caught his for a moment and seemed to suck all the life from the room, an old gaze, her stare older than the hills.

"You can't have what you can't keep," she said. "You can't buy what you won't pay for."

"Shut up," said Al tiredly. "I know you're not real."

It was too much, this latest disappointment. Never before had he thought his dreams cruel. He couldn't even summon the strength to be curious; all he knew was that his brother was gone. He'd been there...and then he was gone.

The girl's lips quirked up in a savage smirk, and she whisked her way into the parlor with a triumphant look on her face.

Only then did he realize what it was she was going for.

"BROTHER!" Al cried again, looking up to see that shock of golden hair cresting through the murky gloom. His brother was in the drawing room somehow, since when had he gotten there -- was his luck finally changing? He tried to see what else he could will to happen but unfortunately nothing changed. He did not teleport magically to his brother's side, he did not suddenly know his brother's real life location. Despite his best intentions, the scene just kept playing.

His brother stood up - and the stranger embraced him.

"Brother!?"

The girl whispered something into Ed's ear and he turned to her, let her put an arm around him -- _he'd never do that, he never let anyone hug him, just what the hell was going on_ -- and then she looked over her shoulder at Al, smiled at him as she escorted Ed toward the door.

Ed didn't even so much as look at him, didn't so much as raise an eyebrow or wave. It was like he looked in Al's direction and saw through him, saw nothing. As though Al _ were_ nothing.

"But why!?" he cried out, lungs on fire. He wanted to lunge at them but it was like an invisible hand held him back. "Why are you leaving with her?"

_Why _did _you leave with her_? A strange echo called back.

Ed said nothing, just stared straight ahead with that same silent, unreadable expression, and the pain in Al's chest worsened. It was the woman who finally moved, shook her head indignantly. Her brown curly hair spread about her head like a corona.

"What else could you have expected?" she said, and laid her hand on the bare skin of Edward's cheek. "When you don't value what you have, someone else will take it from you."

"But he's not yours to take!" Al howled, breathed in pain. _He was mine_ , the echo screamed with him, growing louder. "He's _mine_, he's my brother--"

_He's MINE, he's my best friend-_

The searing in his lungs cascaded, built exponentially, and then suddenly his entire body was on fire. Like a firecracker he went up, and then all of a sudden his pieces exploded. There was a bright flash, and a moment of darkness, and then there was nothing but an endless field of yellow light, a primordial sea of nothing that went on and on forever----save for the strange, yet familiar boy straight across from him, hanging in the middle of that preternatural glow. Pale, sickly skin; a hang-dog expression. A dopey mop of hair that could use a good cut.

Eyes as blue as Winry's, as blue as a cornflower on a summer day.

The Other was right there and staring at him, so close he could reach out and possibly touch him, and all Al could think do to was wonder.

_Who are you? _ he asked, not for the first time, not expecting an answer.

The Other tilted his head down, inclined it politely to one side, as if considering.

_...my name is Alfons Heiderich. Who the hell are you?_


	3. Chapter 3

Even though he knew it was a dream, the light was starting to make him doubt his own sanity.

Alfons had come to realize he was asleep some time ago, but all that had gained him was the knowledge that he was trapped in a nightmare. He was lost in a vast emptiness lit from everywhere at once, no sky or earth to ground him. The only hue in this place was horrible. Yellow had never been his favorite color, in the waking world or otherwise. It reminded him of ill health, of sickness and jaundice. He tried to close his eyes against it, but to no avail…the light permeated his senses like he was being steeped in it, its hue seeping in beneath his eyelids, ears, nostrils. It filtered into his lungs with every quivering breath. It was like the whole world was an aging, sickly bruise.

There was only one thing to distract him from the livid horror around him and his eyes fixed on it as soon as it appeared. The interloper, that odd little boy he'd seen in his dreams the other night was coming into focus in front of him and he clung to the image like a visual lifeline, grateful for anyone, anything besides his own company in the aether.

The more he came to see of the other boy though, the more he wondered if being alone was preferable. The kid could have been no older than thirteen or fourteen, a boy just on the cusp of adolescence, but his features were eerie. The boy's sweet, round little face could have been his own in the mirror four years ago before his jaw deepened, his shoulders held the same hint of coming strength. It was as if someone had taken his younger self and dipped him in honey, lent touches of gold to his hair and eyes and come up with this mockery.

Maybe the light in this place. It was actually starting to terrify him.

_If this is really a dream, why can't I wake up!?_

The interloper stirred in front of him, twitched. They were only a few decameters apart, and this close, Alfons could see the very pores on the child's face flex and stretch as he moved.

Hazel eyes swiveled to Alfons and fixed him with a dubious glare.

"Who are you?" the Interloper asked, in a voice that reminded Alfons even more eerily of his youthful self.

Alfons reflexively attempted to take a step back, startled, but he found himself unable to move from the place where he was hanging/floating in space. It was as though they were suspended in an invisible viscous substance – or perhaps light itself was _thick_ here, syrupy. His arms and legs felt like they were moving through molasses and no matter how hard he pedaled he found himself going nowhere.

"I'm Alfons Heiderich. Who the hell are you?" Alfons snapped back, irritated at being unable to move. Irritated at the whole situation, really. He had never been the type to concern himself with dream interpretation, but at the moment, he was deeply regretting it.

"No, wait, let me guess. My younger self is here to tell me what a failure I am. Is that what this is all about? Well, I'm sorry, I'm not much for the mind sciences, all this is wasted on me. I'll go find a book about it in the morning…can I please wake up now? Please?"

The interloper's fine eyebrows scrunched together on his bronzy forehead. If anything he looked even more confused. Apparently Alfons stumped even his own unconscious.

"Younger self…but I'm Alphonse _Elric_," the boy said, stressing the surname.

Alfons's eyes went wide.

"Elric!?" Edward's strange surname, he'd recognize it anywhere. He had never heard anyone else – not even Edward's professor father, come to think of it – call themselves by that name. "You know Edward!?"

A little ghostly image of Edward appeared in the short space between them, a strange, distorted picture coalescing right between their bodies. Alfons stared at it incredulously. Even the knowledge that this was a dream (_had to be a dream, how else could things like this be happening!?) _did little to downplay the oddity that was a miniature, transparent vision of his friend floating in mid-air.

"Ed!"

"Edward?!"

They both spoke at the same time and then started in unison too, blinking distrustfully at one another through the transparent vision.

"…how do you know him?" 'Alphonse' asked. He cocked his head to the side and squinted, a bit of a frown on his face.

"He is my friend from university. I live with him," Alfons replied. His eyes flicked to the Edward-vision which was spinning slowly between them. It was funny, as odd and unsettling as this whole nightmare was, the only thing he could think at the moment was that the real Edward would be horribly offended at the size of his representation. It was about the size of a large doll, just big enough to fit between the two of them without touching either.

"And I could ask you the same question, how do you know Edward?" _And how is it you get to call him by a nickname…_ Something inside him twisted at that. For all they had been friends for nearly two years now, Edward resisted all forms of nickname. The one time Alfons had tried to call him 'Ed', Edward had glared at him so severely he had never dared try again.

The other boy did not seem to be listening to him though. He was staring intently at the vision of Edward and his eyes held a new intensity, fervent, almost rabid.

"You know my brother…like this…"

Alphonse sucked in a breath with an ease that Alfons envied. The little Edward flickered and shrunk even further, transforming into a small, apeish boy with Edward's golden eyes.

"The last time I really remember seeing him, he was eleven," Alphonse said. His voice was ripe with unbridled excitement. "I've seen pictures from up until he was sixteen. The Ed that you know…how old is he?"

Alfons almost missed the question, so fascinated was he by the tiny Edward-ghost. It was clear now that whatever geas had summoned Edward's likeness must not have gifted it with the ability to speak, because he'd expect an actual Edward to be shouting by now. As Alphonse talked, the vision kept winking in and out of existence, changing more each time it resolved. Alfons watched as short, stocky child grew into slightly taller, wiry adolescent; straight, shaggy hair grew down and then twined into a braid. Every now and again there was a step backward in the progression, where it seemed Edward's height or hair was a smidge shorter, his chest less defined, but then there would be a leap forward again as the overall trend was that Edward was growing up and out. It was like watching someone flick through a physical photograph album…a portrait of Edward in fits and starts, projected in three-dimensions.

"How old is the Ed you know?" Alphonse insisted again. His arms and legs jerked slowly, vaguely in Alfons's direction, as if he were fighting to move through same invisible force Alfons had been unable to conquer earlier. It looked as though he were trying to pounce.

"Eighteen, I think…" Alfons said. "We celebrated his birthday not long ago."

The vision between them blinked one last time and finally became the Edward he remembered – a touch longer in the torso, a touch broader at the shoulders, his hair pulled back into a high ponytail. Holding a pint of beer and smiling, the way he had looked at the pub on his eighteenth birthday, before the fall had set in and that sad, resigned scowl had taken up permanent residence on his face.

Alphonse across from him struggled all the harder against his unseen bonds, a wondrous expression on his face. His fingers splayed out, grasped through the aether toward the vision, every fiber of the boy's being visibly yearning toward the image of Edward.

"I _knew_ it!" Alphonse breathed. "He's alive, I told them so! Where are you? What city? What country? Latitude, longitude? Any close-by landmarks?" And right into a series of desperate questions, each more grasping at loose straws than the last. Alphonse didn't even wait for the answers before launching into the next one.

Again, Alfons got the eerie feeling that once again he was no longer entirely _there _to the other boy, that his questions, concerns, wishes...everything in the world took a backseat to the topic of Edward, and what Alphonse wanted to know about him. It reminded him of talking to Edward himself about family. The fervent, half-mad dedication in the boy's eyes was unfortunately all too familiar.

"Are you really his brother?" he found himself asking in spite of himself.

Alphonse looked at him as if that question was preposterous.

"Of course I am, hasn't he mentioned me?" The other boy's expression dimmed. "Unless…he hasn't forgotten _me_, has he? Is that why he hasn't come home? Why do you ask that?!"

Tempting topic, Edward's whereabouts, but Alfons was sure to steer clear. If he was going to get to the bottom of this, he had to attack the problem rationally, head-on.

"Because this is a dream…the Isar doesn't flow with sand." He tasted the words and found them agreeable. They felt heavy on his tongue, gave him power against this strange doppelganger. Fact and reason, those were perennially his weapons; in the glare of this alien yellow light he clung to them like a lifeline. All else failed him but he had his intellect, and if all he could move was his tongue then, so be it. He locked eyes with the stranger and leveled shots one by one, darts of logic aiming for the heart of the nightmare.

"The Isar doesn't flow with sand. Nor does our boarding house have a landing, or a foyer. Miss Gracia is not an old woman. And Noah…t-the gypsy has been gone for some time now," Alfons said sharply, trying not to falter at that memory. "Almost two weeks now."

The image of Edward blurred and then winked out altogether. In its stead rose a familiar specter: a gorgeous girl with thick, dark hair like a waterfall of melted chocolate, soft curves that tested the contours of her demure dress. Her slight smile seemed to be mocking him, those full, round lips set to devour.

"What are you talking about?! Who is that?" 'Alphonse' asked, all wide-eyed innocence and wonder. Pah. This dream was starting to change from 'slightly frustrating' to 'downright annoying'.

"That's Edward's girl," he replied simply. Alfons balled his hands into fists. "But I'm not arguing with myself, this is absurd. Can I wake up now? Or do I have to listen to myself preach at me too?"

His younger self was looking more and more alarmed by the minute. The expression on his face quite clearly said he thought Alfons was mad. Alfons skewered him with a glare but it did nothing for the sick feeling at the pit of his stomach.

Noah's ghostly eyes were glimmering at him too. If anything her smile deepened.

"This is a dream," Alfons said, a little desperately. "A nightmare. Isn't it?"

Finally, the other boy seemed to catch on. His strange hazel eyes widened and he sucked down on his lower lip, a tic which Alfons didn't recall he'd ever had. When he was hard at thought he tapped his left foot, or if he was sitting, bounced his whole leg beneath the table. Edward did that too. Sometimes the resulting vibration was enough to send pencils scattering off their workbench.

"I think so. It was hard to tell at first," Alphonse said eventually. "I was trying to take a nap…heh, and here I thought I couldn't get to sleep. I must have been dreaming that I was waking up every fifteen minutes."

He offered a quick, nervous little grin with just the corners of his mouth; his teeth were busy chewing at the edge of his lower lip.

"I've been dreaming about you for a while now. About you and my brother both, for the last three or four months. I could see what you were doing…what he was up to. It was the only thing that was giving me hope," Alphonse said softly.

It was Alfons's turn to gape and wonder if the other party had taken leave of his senses…which wasn't good because this other person was a figment of his own imagination, right? If his dream-self was going insane and believing their dreams were real, did that mean he himself was also crazy?

"You're not real," he said again, as if through sheer repetition he could convince this nightmare to finish. Again, fear trickled in around the edges of his thoughts. Like the light, he couldn't get away from it – it simply _was_. He hyperventilated and sucked in only yellow, had the crazy mental image of his insides painting themselves marigold. It was the dream-self, he thought, eying the boy with fury. He couldn't shake this feeling of Other that he had when he looked at him.

His younger self looked oddly hurt.

"I know I can't prove it to you, but—"

"Prove what? You're a figment of my imagination!" Alfons accused.

_Please, let this be a figment of my imagination._

_If this is a dream, then why can't I wake up?_

"You don't exist," he insisted, a plaintive note to his voice. "The real Alphonse Elric died in the war."

The vision of Noah dissipated much like the one of Edward had, only this time nothing immediately popped up to replace it. Alfons was starting to get the creeping fear that the ghosts were things taken straight out of his own thoughts, and he was trying very hard not to think of the many horrible ways in which a child could have died in that war to end all wars. Edward's body alone bore testament to horrors Alfons was grateful that he had never seen. Edward's sheared-off right arm, his sad little stump of a leg…but for the grace of his genius father's prosthetics, the man would be a cripple for life.

There was a pang in his gut all over again and then suddenly the brightness around him took physical shape, yellow intensified and twisted into a bright heat he could scarcely stand to look at. A plane of pure molten color spilled out beneath his feet, a stairway grew up out of it to nowhere, and as the surge of brightness subsided he realized to his horror there was a familiar floor beneath his feet. The oppressive force surrounding his limbs released him all at once and he reeled forward like a puppet with its strings cut across the dull gray tile of Miss Gracia's foyer, nearly slammed into her end table. There was a ceiling above him now, ground below, and directly before him...'Alphonse' was still there, standing in front of the stairs to the second story, his mouth a round 'O' of surprise, and Alfons realized in horror that he was looking at his dream-self staring up at his _actual _self

Alfons was not a religious man, but he crossed himself just in case.

A ghostly vision of himself, not doll-sized but full-size was storming down the steps toward them and Alfons took a step back reflexively. Where 'Alphonse' could be his youthful self but for the strangeness of his eyes and hair, this vision aped his features _exactly_, right down to the brown jacket it was wearing, the briefcase it was holding, everything. This, this was his true doppelganger, so realistic it very well could walk out the door and take over his life like in his grandmother's superstitious ghost stories.

The only thing more terrifying than its furious, frustrated gaze was the vision behind it, a familiar whirlwind of rumpled coat and golden hair. Edward was charging down the steps after the ghost-version of himself, and suddenly Alfons had the sick feeling he knew just what he was about to see.

"Brother!" Alphonse cried out beside him. He sounded so ecstatic. Edward on the stairs had accelerated; his lips were moving frantically although no sound was coming out. Alfons didn't need a soundtrack to know what he was saying though, this part he remembered by heart.

_They're planning a war, using the world I came from. I'm sure the rocket is part of it -- Alfons-_

"Brother? Can you hear me?! Hey!"

"Don't—" Alfons managed, just as the younger boy charged forward into the tableau, right into the middle of the vision of himself. Alphonse stopped short, jerked back as his fingers went through the middle of the illusionary Alfons's chest – just in time to see the false-Alfons's arm whip back and smash into the side of Edward's pretty little face.

He could not hear the sick thud that Edward's body made as he fell backward onto the stair, but somehow that made it all the worse to revisit. Edward's left leg was crooked at an unnatural angle, a nasty little detail that Alfons had not remembered – was it real? Or was it the dream playing tricks on him, making everything worse because he regretted it?

Everything froze, and to Alfons it seemed his next breath came on a whistle.

Alphonse was gaping at the scene in disbelief, the expression on his face one of abject disbelief. He looked back and forth between Alfons and the tableau in front of them the way Alfons had seen Edward staring frantically at thermodynamics equations, at those thrice-damned circular glyphs he doodled all over their lab notebooks.

"H-he's ill," Alfons found himself stammering, retreating step by step until he was flush up against the wall. He wanted to become one with it, he wanted to melt right into the fucking plaster and disappear. "He's not right in the head, he goes on and on about alchemy and other dimensions and you should have heard the crazy rant he was coming out with – damn him, I get so angry—"

The excuse sounded sickening even to his own ears. He choked on it, squeezed his eyes shut.

_I hit a sick, crippled man, maybe even broke his false leg – how is that defendable? _

"He's gone, okay? Is that what you wanted to hear?" he pleaded with Alphonse and his ghost-self alike, the world, God, everything. "I was an ass to my friend and now he's gone for good, that's all I have to give you. I've learned my lesson, I promise, just please leave me alone."

Yellow light was starting to increase at the edges of his vision, sneaking in beneath his eyelids again. He opened them and Alphonse was staring at him with something akin to pity.

"Alfons?"

Alfons averted his eyes, not sure he could handle the other boy's gaze.

"If you really are his brother," he said quietly, in a hollow voice, "then you'd better find him fast. If you're just a ghost, something that I dreamed…maybe it's better for him if you just stayed dead. I've watched him chase too many phantoms already."

Alphonse's eyes widened and he shook his head violently, curled his lips back to shout something. Alfons tried to read the boy's lips, but he could not hear what it was Alphonse was saying. Light was streaming up through the lines between the floor tiles, yellow was pouring in through the cracks in the walls, and it speared him through the eyes and ears and nose and mouth, until the world itself had burned away and his body was nothing but one long scream.


	4. Chapter 4

For the first ten minutes after the dream broke it was all he could do to remember how to breathe. The nightmare sent him careening out of bed, nightclothes and all, and he wandered around for a while in a fog, unsure of what to do with himself, unable to settle. He had no idea at all what time it was. A quick peek out the hall window on his way to the restroom revealed the gibbous moon still fat in the lower half of the pane, a couple embarrassed stars skulking about with it on the horizon. It looked poisonous through the distorted old glass; its bloated yellow face winked at him unevenly, and that was when Alfons realized he wasn't going to be going back to sleep after all.

That same shade of yellow still lingered behind his eyes whenever he closed them.

He stumbled down the stairs like the living dead and wandered into the kitchen, seeking heat, seeking light. He didn't like to impose on Miss Gracia's stove, but mornings in November were rough on the ill and the ill at heart, and right now he was both. Alfons put a small kettle on the boil and hung his head over it, craving steam with an intensity that literally bordered on the physical. There was a twinge in his lungs that refused to be ignored, a sensation like miniature claws were pricking at him from the inside and trying to get out, and there was only one way to scratch that itch.

He wound up hovering over the kettle for a good fifteen minutes huffing hot vapors until the maddening prickliness lifted. Only then did he reluctantly wean himself off. He made sure to clean up carefully and polished the stovetop until it gleamed to assuage his guilt. Hot steam was a luxury because fuel was a luxury - although his 'rent' payments fed the house, they did not cover the cost of gas, nor did anyone else benefit from this particular bit of selfishness. He slipped out of the kitchen and padded back through the hall toward the stair, anticipating at least an easier climb because of his transgression. The common room was alight in a wash of predawn grey, casting long shadows up against the wall, and Alfons once again had the eerie sensation of following a distorted image of himself up the stair.

_Doppelganger,_ he thought again, and shivered.

Even though he had not rested well, the morning's steam had made him feel a little better, so he got dressed and risked a walk down to his old university's library in search of any literature that might inspire him to work on his latest task for Kessler. Technically he was not currently a student, but the girls who worked there who liked him; or else they had yet to realize that he was no longer enrolled. He told most people he was on 'sabbatical', but in reality as an undergraduate, he was not afforded that luxury. It was merely that he did not have the money, nor the time any longer, to stay in a school where the programs denied him time to work on his all-consuming passion. When the aerospace program had been cut, he'd taken the semester off to try and continue privately, first on his own mark, then on the Thule Society's. But as long as no one noticed that he still flitted about the library's stacks, he was content to glean what information he could from the university's stores.

"Good morning, Miss Kiel," he said to the brunette librarian standing watch at the reference desk, pleased to see that again today she took no exception to his presence. She was a serious, stodgy woman, like his grandmother must have been as a young lady, but Miss Kiel afforded him a sunny smile that he never would have seen from Gran. Miss Kiel's thick wall of a face lifted and transformed into something remotely human as she watched him pass and Alfons smiled inwardly. He'd found that it paid to learn the names of librarians, barkeeps, and stewards – they looked on you much more favorably later.

He was also taking a page from Edward's book, namely, the attitude one needed to profess. Edward had his own special brand of charisma, but first and foremost he was audacious. He walked into any new place like he owned it, like he belonged there as much as the light fixtures. Alfons was still learning, but it did seem to help when he held his head up, looked straight ahead, moved with purpose toward what it was that he needed.

"Act like you know what you're doing," Edward had once told him, "nine times out of ten people will assume that you do." According to Edward, he'd made his career out of sneaking into strange libraries. According to Edward, he'd also made his career as an alchemist, a Jesus-figure, and occasionally as an occult mad scientist.

_You're the real fetch_, Alfons thought back to the echo of Edward in his head. He kept wishing he'd catch sight of the man between the stacks, gliding like a bird of prey circling around a mouse. Edward was a predator when it came to books; Alfons realized that he missed hunting with him.

_I keep trying to get rid of you, and yet your ghost just keeps coming back._

That thought brought a darker recollection though, courtesy of the nightmare once again. It was starting to bother him just how often that memory was intruding – how _real_ it still felt, despite its clear insanity. It was so vivid that if he hadn't woken up in his bed, alone in the night, he was actually concerned he might not have realized the dream was just fantasy. The experience was burned into his mind like Fact, the soft details of Edward's brother's face as real as thrust equations. Mass flow rate was mass flowing through a plane over time, and last night he'd gone to some indescribable place to speak with Edward's dead younger brother, who had then conjured a doppelganger of Alfons himself. Right. Of course. It was perfectly logical.

He supposed it was also perfectly logical to make good on his vow to find a rational explanation for what the hell was wrong with him.

Alfons circled into the northeast section of the stacks, although he felt more ridiculous every step he took. The mind 'sciences' were not his favorite part of the library and he rarely had cause to set foot there. Experimental philosophy, psychology, whatever they called it - that was all well and good, but a part of him still resented the fact that experiments into 'the study of consciousness' were continuing when his own program had been cut. Astronautics, that was real science, provable…he could set up a tincture of two compounds and test how well the resulting fuel ignited, or he could use mathematics to predict how many far away a prototype would fly. The mind had too many variables, too few ways to test it.

He fingered a leathery spine indignantly but stopped when he realized which it was: _Principles of Physiological Psychology_. Alfons felt guilty. Wundt's stuff had been all right…all about the mind having root in the physical, reasonable theories which sounded more like actual science. He'd had a few statistics lectures with a guy who'd liked this book, and Ernst had been perfectly nice, dedicated to his discipline like any scientist should be. They'd had a few rousing debates written on note pages during that boring course, since Alfons had nothing better to do than read Ernst's crazy psychology texts. He'd been rather sorry when Ernst had nearly failed the math course because of it.

Out of belated penance, he thumbed through the intro pages of a few more texts to the right and left like a fisherman casting about, but none of the waters he tested bore a trophy. He knew he should probably give up, he was dawdling – the 500 stacks in the library loomed off to his right, the chemistry and physics research calling his name. _But why bother?_ A snide part of him wondered. He'd read everything those shelves had to offer from front to back already. He'd been hoping his mood would lift once he set foot in the library, formerly his sanctuary, but weirdly he found it was depressing him more. It was just a reminder that he wasn't that memorable, that no matter how far he'd come no one had noticed he was a drop-out. The Thule were asking for this new design and they hadn't even tested the one he'd poured his heart into. At least philosophy was something different.

_Maybe I can learn what a grade-A nutter I am, then I'll be glad no one will remember me after I die,_ he thought sourly. _The Interpretation of Dreams_ stuck out like a sore thumb, as well as _Psychology of the Unconscious_; indeed, the whole section was obsessed with man's thoughts when he wasn't thinking. Some of the names he recognized from his ex-classmate's babbling. Alfons flipped through a few volumes by authors he thought he remembered Ernst liking, but the more he looked, the more he realized maybe this field wasn't the panacea he'd secretly been hoping for.

_Every dream will reveal itself as a psychological structure, full of significance…_ yeah, that was exactly what he needed to hear. Alfons closed his eyes and tried to shut it out again, but that yellow was increasing in his mind– and with its rise, growing fear. He didn't want the doppelganger to be a symbol that Meant something, because deep down, he already knew how he must interpret it.

When he had been five years old, his grandmother had regaled him with stories of the** D**oppelganger, evil, ghostly doubles of the living, who could slip away and steal your life whole. He was old enough to know better now, but he had lived in terror for a time – not just of catching his ghost sneaking off in the corner of his eye, but of seeing it directly. Because, according Gran, to look your double-walker in the eye was to look at the portent of your own impending death.

And what did he have to show for it? A few botched experiments, a shaky relationship with his ex-professors. Even Alfons himself had understood that maybe his rocketcraft would never bear him as a rider. Too many things remained untested, and now his time was running out. Alfons leaned his forehead against the edge of the shelf, took a deep breath in until it hurt. He'd fantasized about leaving his designs for the team to finish, but without Edward's brains, would the rest of them ever come close? Edward had been the closest thing Alfons had ever had to a true, honest-to-god peer. They worked the same way, they thought the same way, but the selfish bastard was so obsessed with his own delusions that here he'd gone off with his little Gypsy mystic, chasing after some wild dream—

The memory of 'Alphonse Elric's' similar enthusiasm, so honest, so desperate, cut into him like a knife. Alfons thought about his fury again, and he knew shame.

Because Edward's 'wild dream' had only been to find his family again, as horribly, hopelessly misguided as that might be. Because a horrified part of himself realized that maybe part of the reason he was upset at Edward trying was that it kept Edward from helping with Alfons's own obsession.

And at least Edward had never tried to hold Alfons back. That was the part that sickened him, now that he was finally awake to think about it. He'd relived that night through the nightmare actions of his doppelganger, and for the first time he had seen what it must have truly looked like…Alfons lashing out in momentary frustration at the last man who deserved it. It wasn't Edward's dream to set foot in space. Edward's dream was likely unrealizable, but misguided or not, Edward had always been the type to see what he wanted and go for it.

That was when Alfons realized the truth.

Maybe the soft sciences were right, and there was a reason his doppelganger had appeared to him in his sleep. Maybe there was a reason he he'd seen his 'evil' twin knock Edward down.

Maybe it was time Alfons stopped wallowing in self-pity and snitched another page from Edward Elric.

* * *

A few hours later, out of the city and in a car headed to the Thule Society's villa, Alfons found he was already feeling better. Nervous as well …but overall, better about his decisions, his convictions, and the direction things were going to take. Kessler and the rest of the Society had been depending on him these past several weeks to deliver miracles of engineering, no matter how impossible some of their specifications had been on short notice, and Alfons and his team had delivered to the letter. Now the Society was starting a fresh round of demands, but this time, Alfons was ready with some of his own. If they expected him to spend the rest of his natural life working on an entirely new rocketcraft, then he at least wanted to see how the first one performed. No if's, and's, or but's.

He directed the driver to take him right up to the villa's front entrance, ready to rush in and take no prisoners just the way Edward would do. Unfortunately, the stairs threw a bit of a kink in his plans. His valiant charge was more of a slow, mildly wheezy climb with periodic glances stolen at the door guards. If he started coughing blood here, there would be lots of questions that he would rather not answer.

The two guards closest to the villa's front doors stepped casually in front and formed a wall with their bodies. They were huge, easily as tall as Alfons was, and their chests were built like beer barrels. More ex-military, Alfons thought with alarm. One even bore a waxy scar in the place where his left cheek should have been, like a candle that had come too close a fire. Both of them were armed.

"State your business?" the non-melting one demanded. The very slight rise at the end of the phrase was the only thing that made it a question. The slight raise of his gun made it a question that Alfons couldn't refuse.

Alfons drew up to his full height, well aware this was a challenge. Normally he entered through the service doors to the adjoined factory; the upper levels of the villa were private for the owners and the upper echelon of the Society, like Kessler.

"I am the Chief Aerospace Engineer for the Society," he said, hoping perhaps long titles would impress them. "I am here to see Dr. Kessler on a related matter." He neglected to mention that he didn't have an appointment.

The puddle-faced man grunted and quirked up the non-mutilated side of his lip.

"You got proof?"

Again, those musket tips were trained ever-so-casually at Alfons's kneecaps…security had gone up, his driver had said yesterday; the man had not been kidding around. Alfons reached slightly shaky fingers into his pants pocket to withdraw the contract Dr. Kessler had given him to prove he was commissioned into service for the Thule Society.

_Keep it with you, m'boy! Always have to be careful of quality control_, the fat little man had said. Alfons wondered if 'quality control' involved removing intruders' legs.

He offered his documentation to the guard and tried not to stare too obviously at the man's face. Melting Cheek unfolded the well-worn piece of paper and grunted again, squinted hard at the lines of legal rubbish. Either he couldn't see well, or he couldn't read.

"The seal's at the bottom," Alfons offered. The guards themselves were wearing it too, he realized with faint shock. A bright, if inexpertly painted version of the wax seal that his contract bore was visible on each man's front pocket, a shining sun with a sword beneath it, garnished with leaves. The crest of the Thule Society, and something he'd previously only seen used as a gentleman's signature stamp. Furthermore, there was something nastily regular about their mode of dress. Their dark pants and brown coats weren't exactly uniform but it looked as though they were attempting to be. The non-scarred one's pants looked almost like they'd been dyed to fit; the color was uneven in places. Again, quiet discomfort echoed at the back of Alfons's mind.

_Who are these people, that they have their own uniform?!_

Melting Cheek made a dangerous rumbling noise and Alfons jerked back to attention. The man was consulting a little black journal book and frowning at his compatriot.

"I don't have you on the list," he said.

Alfons was already of the mind that perhaps this had been a mistake. Sure, Edward might be the sort to waltz right on in here and tell the 'gentlemen' that of course he was on there, they must simply be looking at the wrong list. Edward also had the devil's own luck and acted like he wasn't afraid of anything that heaven or hell could throw at him. Alfons had witnessed personally the time his friend had taken on two drunken self-described 'troublemakers' at a beer hall, and each of their fists had been roughly the size of a small boulder. The most insane part of all had been that Edward had won.

"I can go round to the factory then, never mind," Alfons said. He reached for his papers but the guard pulled them farther away, apparently not done glaring and grunting at them.

"Corporal," Melting Cheek addressed his companion, who jumped to attention, "take this to the Doctor, let him know that – hey, what's your name, boy?" He turned to Alfons and skewered him with a glare. Suddenly, Alfons understood the problem.

"My name is Alfons Heiderich," he said, as slowly and calmly as he could manage. "I came into the Society straight from University."

Which hopefully explained why he looked so young to them, so they could stop looking at him like dogs scenting out poisoned meat. Sometimes he cursed his round baby face…his height helped some, but at the end of the day he still often had the same problem as Edward. Colleagues didn't take them seriously because they looked like babes from the breast.

"Is there a problem with my papers?" Alfons asked.

"Not as such," the guard said, but he did not relinquish them. Instead, he passed the contract over to 'Corporal' and gave Alfons an appraising look.

"Corporal, run these up to Dr. Kessler."

"Yes sir."

"I'm going to escort his guest inside."

_I'd really rather you not,_ Alfons thought desperately. This was already getting way out of hand. 'Security' was one thing, but it was starting to scare him the way they were reacting.

"Look, I called for a motorcar to drive me from the station," he said, trying not to let the concern in his voice show. "One of your men dropped me off here."

Melting Cheek pushed the door open and urged Alfons through it with a curt wave of his gun barrel. Alfons was now thinking the man suffered from the same form of selective deafness that so often plagued Kessler.

"Your motor pool should be able to verify my identity, I come and go from the factory a lot."

"But not from here," the guard said. Alfons tried not to be intimidated by the fact that the man was capable of literally stonewalling him. The sloughing skin on his cheek lent the impression of an impenetrable mask, and that was the side that was currently turned to Alfons.

He ushered Alfons through a cavernous tiled foyer and into a corner close by an ornate staircase.

"If Dr. Kessler wishes to see you, he will be down shortly," the man said.

"And if he does not come down?"

The guard didn't answer.

_Okay, what would Edward do now? Since thinking like him got me into this mess,_ Alfons thought to himself, trying not to panic. It wasn't as if he hadn't seen armed men before. Surely the guns were for show, they wouldn't actually use them. He'd shown them his papers, the contract was legit. Edward would tell him they needed to stay calm, he decided, just like the time they had run into some shady characters on the way home. Alfons had been prepared to cut loose and run for it, the way he usually survived such things, but Edward had convinced him they could defuse the situation just by keeping level-headed and ultra alert. Alfons took as deep a breath as his lungs would allow and tried to take in his surroundings, look for anything useful or unusual that might help him.

The most immediately salient detail was the EXIT of course; back down the hallway and out through the foyer. That didn't take much detecting though, since he'd just walked through it. Alfons turned his attention to the staircase. It was one of the fancy ones that split into two at either edge of a landing, each associated with a separate door. Both were closed. Really, the villa was very, very opulent. It looked like the stair's rails were gilded with some kind of gold-leaf paint, or at least a very effective fake. There were also two doors on the same level he was on, which he noticed belatedly with an inward wince. It was a good thing he wasn't actually running for his life right now, else he'd probably be dead already. Alfons was still optimistic that this bizarre encounter was going to end perfectly peacefully, and the more he looked around, the calmer he was starting to feel.

He was also feeling like a fish out of water, especially as he took in more details. Melting Cheek wasn't offering any information, but the fineries of the wainscoting, the staircase's gilded handrail, even the fancy round reflection mirror on the opposite wall spoke for themselves. Compared to Ms. Gracia's stripped down, bare-bones home, this place still retained many of the luxuries that other people could no longer afford. It was true that a countryside home this large spoke of Old Money, but those pockets must run deep indeed if no one had thought to sell off the art objects.

There was a noise at the top of the stair and both Alfons and Melting Cheek looked up at the same time. The door on the east side of the landing swung open, but it wasn't Kessler's familiar bulk that came striding out. Another tan-and-grey uniformed soldier (he was starting to think of them that way, _soldiers_) appeared and he was carrying a long wooden pole in both hands. He turned stiffly and held the door open, gestured to someone inside. Alfons wondered if perhaps he was crippled and that was why he needed the quarterstaff.

All bets were off though, once he saw what was coming behind the soldier. Another uniformed man, this one even burlier, also carrying a pole – and a smaller, dark-complexioned form, literally half the burly soldiers' sizes, swathed in drab skirts…a woman.

A familiar woman.

_NOA!_ The name formed on his lips before he could stop it, and only the sudden shift of Melting Cheek beside him kept Alfons from giving the word breath and crying it out. He disguised the slip with a calculated cough. Luckily it wasn't hard to make it sound convincing.

Melting Cheek wasn't looking at him, though. He was focused on the tableau above with a peculiarly intent look on his face - had his features not been frozen by deformity, he might almost have seemed concerned. Alfons followed the man's gaze and immediately noticed the same oddity. Despite the gypsy's slight frame, the soldiers with her gave her space as though she were two times as large. They flanked her like men walking with a rabid wolf, each holding their quarterstaffs in the hand closest to her – caging her with the poles, Alfons realized as the little trio started to descend the stair. Her skirts shifted too far to one side, and the soldier on that flank edged his pole in more toward her. Warding her off.

Alfons surreptitiously pinched himself, just in case, but the pain told him he was very much awake.

Noa's eyes were downcast at the stairs in front of her and she moved with slow, calculated steps. She looked thinner than the last time he had seen her, there was a certain hollow look to her cheeks that reminded Alfons of what he saw when he looked at himself in the mirror, and he wondered in horror if perhaps _he_ was the reason they were directing her with sticks. The tickle in his chest seemed to grow into a flame, a literal guilty ache.

_She lived with us for a time…did I give it to her, too?_

He knew immediately that he couldn't acknowledge her. It was a horrible, awful thing to think; but if they were quarantining her like this because she was a consumptive, what hope had he if the truth came out? Alfons tried to turn his face as far away as possible without drawing attention to himself. The Thule did not look kindly on the weak…now he was seeing proof of that for certain.

"Ah!"

He must not have moved fast enough though, or else her vantage point from the staircase gave her a good look at his face anyway, because the gypsy suddenly let out a startled sound. Alfons's attention immediately snapped back to her, along with everyone else's in the room, and oh god in heaven, she was staring right at him – Alfons was absolutely sure that she knew him. She stopped dead, like a deer in a car's lamplight, and the soldiers to either side of her sprang at least another foot away, right up against the grand stair's railing. Their poles came in to squeeze against her elbows, and the gypsy started – then started to _run_, hurtling down the stair toward Alfons in a blur of skirts and dark hair. Alfons braced himself as the harpy descended, talons outstretched, waiting to claim his sorry hide as prey.

The men with her reacted instantly, though not quickly enough to grab her before she got a few feet in lead. Alfons watched in shock as they smashed in on her sides as hard as possible with their poles, trying to pinch her between the staves and impede her progress; to his left, Melting Cheek hefted up his gun.

"Don't!" one of the soldiers called out, but it wasn't clear whether he was speaking to the gypsy or to Alfons's guard. Noa continued to struggle between the poles and the two men pinched her harder, to the point where her sides pressed in. Neither of them made a move to grab her.

_Is this how they would treat me?_ Alfons wondered, faintly horrified. Like a rabid animal, like the consumption would spread if they so much as laid a finger to her clothes. Noa made it a few more steps, still focused on him before finally she gave up, panting. The poles on her sides were pressing so hard, apparently they restricted her breath.

Her dark eyes were large, anguished voids in her face, and Alfons wished he could say he was sorry.

Melting Cheek looked as though he were ready to say something but one glance from Noa's attendants silenced him.

"Come on then," the soldier spat at the gypsy and gave her yet another vicious thwack. Noa began moving, once again slowly, but she did not shift her gaze from Alfons. She remained fixated on him as they alighted at the end of the stair, and her attendants began urging her off to one of the side passage. Alfons and Melting Cheek watched the bizarre procession in silence. Melting Cheek looked about as shocked as Alfons felt.

They reached a side door and one of the soldiers unlocked it with a key, threw it open with little fanfare and gestured for her to enter. Noa ducked her head obediently and followed the man's lead.

Just before she disappeared, she looked back at Alfons over her shoulder and mouthed a single word. Alfons felt his blood run cold.

Melting Cheek turned to look at him and Alfons was acutely aware that he was under the microscope once more. Whatever happened, he couldn't let on that he'd understood any of that.

"What on earth was that mess?" he huffed, trying for his best Entitled Young Genius impression. "I thought the Society was for ridding us of gypsies, not coddling their women."

"Mm."

The guard did not seem convinced, but at least there were no questions. He looked uneasy but shifted back into his holding position, once again watching the stair, though Alfons noticed this time he held his rifle higher. It was clear there was not to be any more discussion.

Alfons didn't mind. It gave him time to think. He was no lip reader, so he wasn't at all sure he'd gotten the message right, but Noa's last, desperate attempt to communicate had jogged his shocked mind back on course. The last time he had seen the gypsy – outside of his feverish, spiteful nightmares – Noa had been at home with his roommate. Watching the two of them fight silently from the top of Gracia's stair. Now here she was, being corralled by the Thule Society, possibly stricken with an illness Alfons had given her. Of all the questions whirling around in his mind, one leapt to the forefront, first and foremost. He had no clue what the answer might be, and Alfons was determined to find out.

If Noa was here, where was Edward?

* * *

_The train whistle blew in the distance and he knew he didn't have much time left. It was still a very early morning, but Gramma Pinako had ears like a hawk, and he knew once he started the reaction, there wasn't going to be any going back. He had his suitcase all packed, his brother's jacket pressed. Kissed Edward's old bottle of automail lubricant for good luck. Gramma Pinako and Winry were going to be absolutely furious, but if they insisted on believing he was crazy, he might as well oblige them by acting the part. _

_Alphonse transmuted his locked window open and jumped out into a summer breeze, hit the ground running, and didn't look back._

_Like it or not – next stop, Lior._


	5. Chapter 5

A/N: 2008 was a terrible year. I call a do over XD

Thus, in 2009, I believe in the internet!

---

By the time Al woke on the morning of the second day, the train was already far east enough the grass had turned desert. Sand made for slow going, it seemed, or perhaps it was only that there was so much of it. The world outside his window looped over and over for hours, nothing to see but endless hills of sand.

Lior happened suddenly, like a heart attack.

He had last approached the city by motorcar, so he was unprepared for the city's best side – that it even had a best side, out of its cacophony of ruins and high rises. Approached head-on by rail, it almost came together. The city was sheltered by a wall of adobe, forged first by nomads to keep their oasis clear; modern alchemy had re-envisioned it to be twenty feet thick and two stories tall. There was a gate set into it Alphonse was sure he'd never seen - it was clearly meant to allow rail access into the city itself, and the train line from Central had only recently been completed – and it cut an impressive figure into the side of Lior's boundary wall.

The train swept through Armstrong's overly gaudy archway and into the city itself, to Al's fascination. He liked Lior, on the whole. It was intriguing to see how the people had taken advantage of its destruction. Two years ago, more than half of its structures had been deemed uninhabitable – damaged to the point of instability by the insurrection, and ultimately, the Event. Where others had called for relocation, or costly rebuilding, the Liorans had responded by razing their city, cauterizing its wounds and starting over fresh…primarily with alchemy, donated by the Amestrian government and privately funded charities like the Armstrong L.I.V.E.!!! Foundation. Al had read about it in the paper first, and he had been impressed by their resilience even then. For a populace that had experienced the most catastrophic act of alchemical terrorism in Amestrian history to turn around and embrace the science as a solution…it was downright inspiring.

It was also advantageous. Because so much of the city had been completely deconstructed, the Liorans had been able to plan the rebuilding effort from the ground up and cut much of the cruft from the city's infrastructure. The new train lines were part of that. According to the Lior Railways Information Guide plastered as an advertisement on the back of Al's seat, Lior was the "most accessible city" in all of the Eastern Territory. Tracks ran in to the main depot at the center of the city, and then out again like spokes on a wheel, to connect to a huge loop running right along the inside of the city wall. A series of trams running up and down along the spokes, and also around the circumference of the city, meant that "citizens enjoy economic and expedient transport, for much less than the cost of a private motorcoach".

The guide also offered a timetable for the tram lines, as well as a station map. Al peeled it off the seatback and stuffed it into his jacket pocket. He didn't think it likely anyone would be looking for him, but the fewer people he had to ask for directions, the better.

The train began to slow as it neared the station at the heart of the city – Central Hub, his rail map helpfully identified – and then came to a halt entirely, a good several hundred feet shy of any platform that Al could discern. He pressed his face against the window, along with every other passenger in the car, trying to figure out exactly what was going on.

_The switchhouse is reporting some technical difficulties, ladies and gentlemen, _the engineer cut in via radiophone. _We apologize for the delay. It will just be a few minutes while they get the track operational again…_

A 'few' minutes turned into ten, into fifteen… Al played with his ponytail and tried to be patient as the noise level increased.

It figured.

A baby screamed. Someone farted. People wandered aimlessly up and down the aisle. Curious passengers in the other seats were rapidly turning furious, and by the thirty-two minute mark, Al had had enough. He looked down at his gloves, wondered

More importantly, what would _the Fullmetal Alchemist _do?

Al reached in his pocket for a piece of chalk, sketched a quick array on the side of the train car, and made his own exit.

Predictably, the transmutation drew attention. He had just enough time to jump out with his suitcase and seal up the hole he'd made before three alarmed-looking men came barreling toward him from the front of the train.

"Hey! YOU!"

A pale man who looked to be the train's alchemist was hollering at him, and Al turned to face him, palms out and facing downward in a gesture of supplication. He got YOU'd a lot by people. He'd learned that it paid to look nonthreatening.

"Ye--ah?"

_Yeah,_ not _yessir. _He always had to catch himself. His brother had by all accounts never been known for his command of formal military address. People who had genuinely met his brother invariably saw through his ruse right away – which was good, because then he knew it was safe to grill them for information. One of the first things he'd learned about Easterners was that to hear them tell it, everyone and their mother had been bosom buddies with the great and powerful Fullmetal Alchemist. And generally, the more someone professed to have known his brother inside out, the less likely they were to have ever set foot in the same room with him.

People who hadn'tmet his brother, on the other hand, were often just familiar enough with the details to be taken in by Al's ruse. A small, criminally young boy, out on his own, clad head to toe in black and a red jacket –and also a highly skilled alchemist? It wasn't as though there were a lot of them out there. Al tossed his ponytail back and grinned at the men approaching him, waiting to see which they were.

The rail company alchemist pulled up short and eyed him, showing no sign he recognized the significance of a small, unassuming boy alchemist in a red coat. There were two Lioran men following after him though, and their eyes widened to the size of dinner plates.

Al leveled his gaze at them and went for broke.

"I'm the Fullmetal Alchemist," Al said. "What seems to be the problem?"

****

In the end it was laughably mundane. The switching mechanism for the passenger rail had stuck just shy of the platform and refused to move back to the correct direction, pointing the train obsessively at the switchyard, and each side blamed the other for the malfunction. The train's alchemist blamed the switchyard for not keeping the tracks clean and oiled. The switchhouse workers countered that the rail lines inside the city limits were maintenanced daily, and that the alchemist had been too eager in bending the track.

Al had ignored the lot of them, and in five minutes he had worked out the true cause of the problem. Modern alchemical sandcatchers were the only way trains could make it into the eastern desert expanses, but like a lot of commercial devices, they weren't designed with finesse in mind. The array in it was keyed simply to draw up the steel of the track and then separate it from whatever compound was polluting it, rust or sand or, in this case, the oil the trainyard workers used to grease their switches. Once he'd determined that, he was able to transmute the switch mechanism open so they could lubricate the mechanism. He cautioned the railway alchemist not to activate the sand catcher near switchyard limits, and told the switchhouse workers it was now their responsibility to keep that section clear.

On the whole, both parties seemed pleased. One of the Lioran workers offered him an all-day rail pass, which he gladly accepted. The Fullmetal Alchemist was not a mercenary, but he would not frown upon a reasonable reward for services rendered.

His real prize was information, anyway. The other Lioran worker knew which tram stop was closest to Plaza d'Oasise, confirmed that was where the other 'government investigators' were stationed.

He took a brief detour to the restroom to freshen up as best he could, then consulted his stolen rail map, only one destination in mind. The map advised that the famous 'plaza of the oasis' was not actually located at the exact center of the city, as most people thought, because the city's borders had changed since Lior's founding. It was instead billed as 'the spiritual and mercantile 'heart' of the city, a place where travelers gather to drink in each other's culture'.

It was also a single tram stop to the north on the Red Line. Al caught the very next trolley headed out from the station. It was empty save for himself and a sour-faced driver.

The trolley platform was a rickety little island in the middle of what looked like should be a busy, dangerous street. Al saw all of two motorcars before he was able to cross.

A sign at the plaza's west entrance explained why:

FORMAL INVESTIGATION ONGOING!

TRESPASSING FORBIDDEN.

The message was repeated in six languages and stamped at the bottom with the seal of Amestris, a stylized green lion atop two sheaves of wheat. Accentuating the point were two armed soldiers standing beneath it, lions themselves. And no hope they hadn't seen him. They were watching him with a predator's interest, laid-back but exceedingly attentive.

Al's heart started pounding high in his throat; a hummingbird's rhythm, almost painfully fast. He slid his hands into his pockets and tried to pretend that he wasn't thirteen and horribly conspicuous, wearing bright red and all black in the heat. Al was also uncomfortably aware again of how very pale his skin was. At home, he was freakishly tan for November. Back here, in the arid east, he was what the Ishvar called a 'desert rose' – a delicate flower that reddens, and withers.

Al hung a right and turned away to the south, zagged into a side alley and waited for a second to see if he was being followed. His intuition proved unfortunately accurate. The larger of the two soldiers – a Lioran man with thighs about as big around as a tree trunk – was poking his head around just a few yards away.

Al gritted his teeth and retreated quickly to the opposite connecting street. If these goons were police, he wouldn't bother with them, but these men were actual military. Actual military, he didn't cross without a plan. Unlike the schlubs at the trainyard, the actual military had ways of verifying his identity. In a pinch, he could put in a call to Miss Sheska and her mysterious boss, 'Major Fuery', in Central, but he didn't want to trouble her anymore than absolutely necessary. He was never sure just how far that line of favors ran.

_Why bother, anyway?_ He thought, fingering the bit of chalk still stuck in the corner of his right jacket pocket. If there was one thing that being the Fullmetal Alchemist had taught him so far, it was that if there was will – and more importantly, _skill_ - there was always a way. Still fancying he could hear footsteps imminently behind him, Al dropped down to his knees and chalked an array low on the nearest brick building, praying it was minor enough not to attract attention.

Energy hissed and crackled beneath his fingers and he drew a ley line up right through the mortar holding the building together, urging it to loosen up. As always, it felt like painting with power lines. The array set off sparks in tangential directions, gave off light and heat as though he had drawn it in neon. Al tried to lean one shoulder against the building to shield what he was doing, then promptly gave up in favor of finishing quickly.

_Just enough for a foothold…no need to get fancy._

By compressing liquefied mortar around them in just the right way, he wiggled a few key bricks partway out of the building's façade. He continued until he had several good handholds and then let the reaction complete, reforming the mortar into its solid state and leaving the wall newly uneven. Al whipped his head back and forth once, to make sure the man following him hadn't detected the reaction, saw nothing. He took his chance and put a shoe up on one of the toeholds, grabbed for another with his hands. Al scrambled up his makeshift 'ladder' as fast as humanly possible and pulled himself onto the roof, very grateful he was wearing gloves.

Even though the roof was fashioned from a light-colored tile, meant to reflect the sunlight, it was still exceedingly warm. Al could feel heat radiating right through the palms of his gloves, and he hated to think what it would be like if his hands were bare. He was also acutely aware of the river of sweat running down the middle of his back, and the uncomfortable sound of his own blood roaring through his ears. He had spent some time in Ishvar, relatively recently, but that had been in more sensible clothes. Al shucked his red coat off and tied it around his waist, then pressed himself flat against the roof and started creeping toward its apex. With any luck, no one in the plaza would think to look up.

The so-called 'Plaza of the Oasis' had been built over an aquifer, and so named for the lush desert oasis that once stood there. The water that came up through that spot now was piped through an elaborate alchemically designed fountain system, though, and largely just for show. The biggest reserves of water were found elsewhere in the city, courtesy of a modern system of artesian wells. Even still, the Oasis Fountain was an iconic image. Al didn't need his tourist map to tell him what it looked like. A towering, intricate spire, carved by hand from a single solid piece of desert marble, it had once flown red with wine, back in 1915 when the sun cults were active. It had been respected enough to be preserved by the warring forces even during the Lioran Insurrection. It was a balm to its people, and an inspiration to all who saw it; a joy to desert travelers seeking refuge beneath the spray that cascaded all around it.

The great fountain was all but obliterated now. Its ruins were visible in piles all around the plaza, lying on blue tarps tagged with neon paint, though he couldn't read said labels at this distance. The marble spire lay in pieces side by side nearest the great solar dias – what was now a gaping hole, a circular wound shot through the true heart of the city. All around it, the earth was mounded up like an ant hill.

The entire site was cordoned off with military barricades and police tape, and there were a fair amount of human 'ants' moving all around the hill – some visibly Lioran, others Amestrian, most clad in the blues and grays of the military. There were a few olive-green Lioran Civil-Defense Force uniforms as well, mostly on truck drivers. Al could see a fair amount of mechanical earthmovers stationed all around the hole. A couple were actively being used to dig.

Al watched the action for a few minutes, trying to piece it all together.

_Machines_ digging, not alchemists…and barricades on every side, not just at the plaza entrances, but around the site itself too. Even the flow of earthmovers going to and fro from ground zero was heavily regulated. A truck would drive in toward the broken earth, and then, incredibly, workers would start shoveling debris in _manually._ No transmutations at all. Which didn't fit with Lior's new image as an scientifically progressive city, unless…

They must be worried about activating a hostile array, Al realized. Whatever unknown method the terrorists had used to bring in those armored monstrosities must not have been discovered and disarmed yet.

That would explain why they were going through the rubble so thoroughly, too. Now that he knew what to look for, he could trace ant-lines leading back from the hill to the piles of fountain parts, to other squares of standard-issue plastic tarp holding odds and ends. The excavators were separating out anything that wasn't just plain dirt. They were looking for the source.

Which meant, he still had time to find it for himself.

He had a solid lead for the first time in ages, and unlike the ones in his dreams, _this_ desert excavation looked like it might hold pay dirt. He needed a phone. He needed a phone _yesterday_.

Al yanked the dog-eared rail map out and spread it out in front of him. He had no idea where the nearest public phone booth was, and according to the tourist information, the hotel district was back toward the west. The L.I.V.E. foundation was just a few blocks away, though – and that was where Miss Rose had her orphanage.

_Bingo._

He monkeyed his way back down the side of the building and took off running in generally the right direction. The rail map didn't have a lot of detail on the street level, but the sun was just far enough from the zenith that he could tell east from west. By trial and error, he managed to pick a route past the plaza to the Palace of the Sun. It was the former site of one of the city's largest churches, now home to the Armstrong Foundation's charity headquarters, and Al had to laugh when he saw what had become of the structure's main spire.

Yet another Atlas-Armstrong, this one flexing heavenward, thrusting a cheerful fist into the eastern sky. A billboard sculpted beneath it proclaimed in florid text: _Let's Invigorate with Vivacious Energy! L.I.V.E. Proud!_

The orphanage was built on a corner of the old church complex, with a pretty iron gate ringing its front yard and entry. Children were playing in cacophonous harmony, at least fifteen of them that Alphonse could see. They ranged in age from two to perhaps eleven, toddlers in a sand box and older boys playing catch. And there was Miss Rose, right there in the center of the chaos, trying to watch over the action. She was wearing a loose, white shift that hugged along her curves. Toddlers hugged her knees.

"Miss Rose!"

Al waved at her frantically through the front gate, grinning hard. It had been a while since he'd actually gotten to see her, not counting their brief, frantic encounter the week before.

"Alphonse?!"

"Yeah," he called back, clutching at the bars. "I'm back in town!"

"Wait a moment, I'll come get you."

Rose still looked a tad startled, which wasn't surprising. She bent down to peel toddlers off her and waded over toward Alphonse, reached up to unfasten the gate.

"I hadn't expected to see you so soon. How are you feeling?"

"Fine!"

Al gave her his absolutely sunniest smile, trying to exude Health and Sanity through every pore. Rose ushered him through the gate and patted him shoulder to elbow.

"Last I saw you, they were shipping you home on a stretcher…"

"…alchemical exhaustion. I just needed to rest, I'd over-exerted myself."

He felt a little guilty for lying to her, but what else could he do? Not even Winry believed him when he told the truth about where a part of his conscious had gone…the other world that he was increasingly sure _did_ exist. _Was_ the key to finding his brother again. And as much as he hated having to be dishonest, he also needed Rose's help too much to risk her judging him crazy.

"Listen, ah, I was hoping you might have a phone I could borrow. I need to make a call to someone in Central. It's kind of sensitive."

Rose's eyes lowered a little. In suspicion? In concern? Al couldn't tell which.

"You do have a phone, don't you?"

"Yes, inside…you should come in, we have mesquite tea on," she said after a moment. Her voice was brisk and expression seemed a little brighter, which was reassuring. Al released a breath he didn't know he'd been holding.

"I can ask Alex to watch over the children…yes? What is it, Eddie?"

One of the toddlers that had previously been clinging to her leg was pushing his way between them, latched on to her hand. He was a round-faced, dark-haired thing, with skin far too pale to be comfortable in the vicious Lioran sun. He was her biological son, but aside from the hair color, it was hard to see a resemblance.

Eddie peered up at Al suspiciously from beneath the brim of a wide sun hat, sucked hard on a chubby little thumb.

"What's the matter? Don't you remember Uncle Al? Look, it's Uncle Al!?"

"Hey there," Al said. He tried to stoop a little lower and look as non-dangerous as possible, but the toddler was having none of it. Eddie squirmed and hid his fat face against Rose's leg.

"He's been very shy lately, I'm afraid. I wish I knew why."

Rose bent down and scooped her child up into her arms, balanced him against one hip. She pressed a tender kiss to the side of one chubby cheek.

"It's okay. I wouldn't expect him to remember me anyway. We last met when you were really little, isn't that right, Eddie?" said Al.

Al caught the quickest flash of brown eyes before Eddie planted his face in his mother's breasts, and that was it – the child simply couldn't be convinced that Al's intentions were good, or at least, that he was worth tolerating. Rose kissed the crest of her son's dark head and rocked him, and Al was struck by the strangest mix of happiness and longing.

Families were things that could hurt him sometimes, in ways that he hoped they would never know.

"Watch the children for a minute, would you please? I need to get Alex."

Rose disappeared into a side door Al hadn't known the orphanage had, taking her fearful son along with her. Leaving him alone with her charges. He wasn't sure what exactly he was supposed to be watching, but it seemed like the children were more or less all right playing on without help. None of them were crying or bleeding out the head, that was good enough for government work.

Several of the older boys were looking at him from across the yard with curious expressions. A couple of them waved.

"Hey!" One of them yelled. He was a taller kid with stereotypical Lioran looks, broad shouldered and barrel-chested, with skin the color of a fat dark olive.

"Heads up!"

Something small and spherical came whizzing toward his head, so fast that Al didn't have time to think, only react. He flung an arm up to defend himself and caught the weapon by reflex. It resolved into a rag-tag baseball, cheerfully missing stitches and stained the same yellow color as the playyard dirt. Al stared at it for a few long seconds, momentarily not comprehending.

"Nice catch!"

The other boy was very near him now, wearing a grin from ear to ear. Al took a step back in spite of himself.

"I'm Tomas, who're you? You wanna ball with us?"

"Er—"

"You got a good eye, you could be catcher. Hari kind of stinks at it, you can have his glove."

_They think I'm one of them,_ Al realized. _They think I'm just another kid._

Well, this was awkward.

The other boys were watching now too, visibly sizing him up from across the way. Al rubbed at the back of his head, trying to think. He didn't want to offend the orphans, and well, a part of him _was _thrilled at being asked. When he and his brother had been little, they'd mostly just been able to play catch between the two of them. Winry had only been interested so far as she got to experiment with pitching machines. He couldn't remember the last time he'd even been asked to hit a ball around.

But he needed Miss Rose's phone, he needed to talk to Miss Sheska and Major Fuery. He couldn't well tear off and play sandlot games. He offered the other boy a pained grin and held his hands up.

"I'm sorry, I can't…I'm waiting on Miss Rose…"

"For a bunk?" Tomas glanced down at Al's suitcase. "Well the only open one's in my room, I can take ya up there if you care. Oldest gets to pick top or bottom, 'cept you'll have to share with Mile and he's big, way bigger than you, he gets bottom."

And now it was even more awkward. Hell. There were times Alphonse wished he could just be a normal kid again. If his brother were here…Ed could show off his infamous-and-undefeatable screwball pitch, and Al could hit it high over the fence, and then Ed would probably get mad and yell a lot, but he swore to whatever deity that was out there, he really wouldn't care.

He was saved any further frustration because the side entrance swung open and suddenly the house was giving birth to pure muscle. Al watched as a man roughly the size of a house pushed his way into the sunlight, shirtless as usual, and somehow, glistening.

"Good day to you, young men and ladies!!!"

Citizen Armstrong greeted the world with both arms outstretched, as though he were ready to hug the sky itself. It reminded him of the ridiculous statue on the church spire, and Alphonse couldn't help it, he snickered in spite of himself.

The children seemed genuinely happy to see Mr. Armstrong though. A few of the small ones came over to hug his great knees, and the man's boisterous demeanor turned kind. He bent down and scooped up two at a time, let them climb on his shoulders, his back, his knees. In seconds the towering figure was covered with little ones, beaming, perfectly content to play human tree.

"And how are we doing this fine afternoon?! Are all you children enjoying yourselves?"

He had a thick blonde moustache that moved hypnotically when he spoke. A child reached up to pull on it, but he let on as though her savage yanking was no bother at all.

"Yes Shari, this is the traditional Armstrong Family styling – ah-ah-ah yes, it is quite thick and glorious, and indeed somewhat sensitive, how kind of you to notice."

Al couldn't help but smile. He didn't know the man well himself – only through Miss Rose's many letters – but looking at him gave Al a warm feeling all throughout his chest.

Miss Rose appeared in the doorway behind Armstrong, sans Eddie. She slid up to him and placed a careful hand on the man's elbow, gently guiding him to look in Alphonse's direction.

The man's smile, if it was possible, only intensified.

"And Alphonse Elric…I hadn't expected to meet you again so soon!"

Tomas and the other boys eyed him, clearly curious. Rose's eyes warned him to choose his words carefully.

"I…had some unfinished business out this way," said Al. He bowed low, hands clasped formally against his sides. "Thank you both for helping me last week."

"But of course!!! Anything for the glorious and noble house of Elric!"

And the man's voice was really so kind. He might be odd, but Al was having a hard time disliking him. He _was_ starting to get the feeling that he must have known him. He had a sense of fond exasperation that surely wouldn't happen with a total stranger, would it?

"Won't you come in, Al? We can have that tea now."

Rose beckoned to him from the shaded doorway, and Al picked his suitcase up without a moment's delay. The Fullmetal Alchemist's coat was long and cloying, and a cool, dark building looked very much like sanctuary.

Armstrong's eyes roamed down the back of his brother's coat as he passed. He saw the man's expression tighten a little, out of the corner of his eye.

"I would like a word with you later, Alphonse," the man murmured. "Once the children are otherwise occupied."

"…sure," Al said, a bit reluctant.

"We both would," Rose said.

Rose's fingers reached out and wrapped around his wrist. For all that she was quiet and polite, Al couldn't help but notice her grip was like velvet-padded steel.

The gentle giant remained outside, a sparkling monolith beneath the Lioran sun.

****

Once the door was shut, Rose wasted no time getting down to business.

"Winry wired that you'd run away from home," she said. Her voice, like her hand on his wrist, was gentle but shot through with assertive strength.

Al winced.

"I didn't run away," he said, feeling a bit lame. "I was staying with her until I got better…then I went back out."

Rose tugged him down a long, narrow corridor into what appeared to be a sitting room, urged him toward a chair. Al sat with his hands in his lap, feeling lost, feeling very much like a child.

"She was worried sick about you," said Rose. "The least you could have done was leave a note."

"I was going to wire her as soon as I got settled," Al said. He wished his voice didn't sound so sulky. What was it with ladies trying to be his mother? Pinako at least, she was old enough (_old enough to be his grandmother, more properly_). Rose and Winry…they were both the age he should be, they should be his _friends._

"Al…"

And there it was, that wounded look…her chocolate eyes widened, held a vulnerable light. Like a small forest deer facing down a hunter. Al shifted in his chair, distinctly uncomfortable. When she'd been living with them, she'd gone over like that a lot, to the point he could say that he honestly hated it. When Winry was upset with him, at least she came out and screamed. They would have a row, and then one or the other could apologize. Rose just looked…injured, and that only made him fear for her.

"Rose, I _saw_ him," Al said, gripping at the cuffs of his sleeves. Drawing on his own strength, his own core of steel.

"On the other side of that opening, when those things were going back through? Ed was _there_. He is _alive._"

He leaned forward into her personal space, every fiber of his being on edge - eyes locked on her dark brown ones, willing her to understand. Willing her to see he wasn't crazy. Winry, Gramma, they may no longer have the faith – a truth that hurt, but one that he had to accept – but they had also seen less, experienced less than he and Rose. She had been with him at the beginning of his new life, when he had been born again into this strange dream, this world that had no brother, in a city with no skyline.

Rose, of all of them, had to believe.

The corners of her lips twitched wildly upward, then down again, torn between emotions. Her fingers fluttered in nervous motion, as though her hands no longer knew where to alight.

"You came back on a stretcher," she said. "You were comatose for days."

_No, no, no_, there it was again, that mothering response. Al gritted his teeth together and tried to sit up as tall as he could.

"It doesn't change the fact that I saw him," Al ground out. "Rose, when I fought those armored things, you remember how I put a piece of myself inside them? How I was controlling them? A piece of me was still inside one when it disappeared. That's why I was asleep so long, I think. I was asleep here because my mind was _there_ – in a whole other world. And my brother was there. I spoke to him. I _saw_ him."

He reached forward and grabbed at her dress sleeve, forced her to meet his gaze.

"I know it sounds crazy but it's real, Rose, I swear to you. I can prove it. I need to investigate the site, I need a phone…I have people in Central, and as soon as they give me clearance, I'll be able to look at where that array was. When I find it, I can reproduce the effect, I can show you—"

"NO!"

Rose's cry was like a glass breaking. Al jerked back in spite of himself. The sudden vehemence was unlike her, it was unnerving.

"Al, you can't!"

"Why not?!"

The vulnerability was gone too, replaced with a look he was certain he'd never seen before. Rose's dark eyes seemed to swallow the light.

"Al, it's too dangerous," she said, and there was fire in her voice now. "You don't remember, I know you don't…but I do. That array…"

Her hands alighted on the ends of her chair's arm rests and throttled them.

"It was the same as when the city was razed, Al. It's the Rapture all over again."

A shiver ran down the back of his spine as something about that reached inside him, struck a chord somewhere deep. In a place where strange runes crawled over his skin, behind his eyes. Black ink, dark energy, written all over his metal skin, and he was looking down at himself and he _was _the array…

But no, that couldn't be true. Al had studied the records extensively. Of the few pictures of himself as a disembodied soul that existed, none of them had shown his armor to have any kind of markings, let alone arrays. And officially, what the Liorans called the False Rapture – what the rest of the world called the Alchemical Event of 1915 – had been caused by a suicidal Ishvarite terrorist. He and his brother couldn't have been anywhere near ground zero, and neither had Rose. By all reports, the city had been completely evacuated. The only casualties had been military peace-keepers.

The Fullmetal Alchemist was on record as a hero, for erecting a barrier around the main part of the force.

"I know it might seem _like_ the Rapture," Al said. He tried to choose his words carefully. He didn't want to seem patronizing.

"Arrays on that large a scale can be hard to read, even for the pros. I didn't even get a good look at it. That's why I'd like to borrow your phone…" Al said.

Rose's eyes lowered for a moment as though she were considering it. Then slowly but surely, she shook her head no.

"I'm not wrong. I saw it too many times not to know. Al…how much do you know about the Event?"

"What the military knows," he said, truthfully.

Rose shook her head again, more forcefully this time, and balled her hands into fists.

"Then you think it was an act of terrorism," she said. The vulnerable look was fading, as impossible as that was – replaced by a quiet determination.

"It wasn't."

"…what?"

Rose drew in a deep breath.

"Things were going very badly for us, that summer," she began. Her hands no longer fluttered. Instead they came right to her sides, obediently, like a soldier's. "The fighting was tearing the city apart."

"The Insurrection?"

"The War for Independence," Rose corrected him with a sharp look, and a fierceness Al was sure he'd never seen. "I was one of the Freedom Fighters."

Al blinked. It was hard to conceive of Rose as a rebel. But there she was, drawing herself up in front of him, holding her chin up high, as though daring him to challenge her.

"The military had started using heavy artillery in the third week of July. By the beginning of August, it looked like we were done for. The regime was so relentless…it's hard to explain, Al. It was like it wasn't enough for us for us to _lose._ They wanted us to lose absolutely."

"'Crushing victory' rhetoric?" Al ventured. The old regime had been known for its all-or-nothing ideology, especially in the east. If a strategically significant city refused to submit to the Fuhrer's authority, the old Amestris had not been above making an example of it.

"Something like that," Rose said.

She shivered hard, gooseflesh visible even from where he was sitting.

"I once saw a guerilla trying to surrender with a bedsheet on a rooftop. The snipers in the clocktower... The sheet went up white, seconds later, it was red."

"That is what I'm trying to tell you…it wasn't conquest. It was slaughter, Al. Pure and simple. I don't think they cared if there was a city left or not. They took what they wanted, when they wanted, where they wanted. That was it."

She pressed her legs together so tightly that that her thighs trembled visibly through the cotton of her dress, her mouth set in a hard, if quavering, line.

"Then a man came out of the east, an Ishvarite. Scarred, right here across his face."

She made a gesture like an X in the space between her forehead and eyes.

"That was what we called him, the Scarred One. 'Scar'. I never knew his name."

Another bevy of chills raced down Al's spine, too powerful to ignore this time. What they'd said as a kid was a goose walking over his grave. So many images were a jumble in his head, scarred Ishvarite heretics and a short woman with arresting eyes, lines, lines drawn in the street, and himself, lying at the middle of them, at the _heart _of them…

"You…wore a cowl?" Al said slowly, tasting each part of the thought as he spoke it. It _felt_ right, even though the memory made no sense to him. Rose, as a nun? She had a child with her.

Rose's nostrils flared, as though she were surprised to picture such a thing herself. Her smile was bitter.

"You are remembering things lately, aren't you?" she said quietly.

"Some. Maybe more, with help?"

He was trying not to push her, but it was hard. Lior was _it_, he could feel it…the beginning, and hopefully end, to all his great mysteries. And she had kept it a secret…why?

"I thought you must," Rose sighed. "Yes, Al…I wore _the_ cowl, for a time. It was both my blessing, and my burden."

She picked at the hem of her dress, pressed her thighs together once more, so tight that this time Al could hear the muscles creak.

"The Scarred One was traveling with a woman…an Amestrian woman, we were suspicious of that. She said she knew how we could end it. That we could hurt them enough they would never come near us again. We believed her. The east, at dawn, is a powerful symbol for my people, and as I said, we were weak. We regarded them as prophets."

Al just nodded, feeling slightly ill. He was starting to get the nasty feeling he knew where this went. That he _remembered_ where it went.

"I'm not saying it was right. But it was what we had. In the face of annihilation..." Rose continued. The fire was starting to ebb from her voice, her posture was starting to take on the same kicked-puppy hunch as before.

"The people needed something to believe in. They were vulnerable, frightened…the false prophets took advantage of that. Eddie was born that same week they came to town, and they used that. They said it had been an immaculate birth, that he was a child of Leto. That I was a Holy One. They couldn't have been more off the mark, but by that time…it was like I just didn't care. Anymore, about anything. Not even the baby."

Rose's voice was so inescapably sad then that Al physically ached for her and Eddie. Eddie, that strange, pale-faced child who burnt the way Amestrians did in the desert sun. Eddie, whose name was so like his brother's.

"I don't think anyone else cared if it was true or not either," Rose went on. "It was just a convenient banner to rally around. The woman was an alchemist, she helped us build the underground tunnels. She had me lead our people out of the city, just as the Amestrians advanced…"

_And the rest was history_, Al thought numbly. The nameless Ishvarite terrorist had provoked the Amestrian military contingent into advancing into the city despite the danger. He had drawn an unknown array around the entire city, an array of such magnitude that no one in their wildest dreams had believed he was capable of powering.

An array whose very image had been blotted out of all known records, because in the end, it had been all too powerful. The Lioran "Rapture" had vaporized hundreds, if not thousands, of men, turned huge swaths of the city into rubble. No one knew the mechanic that had allowed the Ishvarite to sustain it.

Rose laughed, a low and bitter sound, and not for the first time, Al wondered what price she had paid to grow so old, so young.

"We've had a lot of false prophets, over the years."

They sat there in silence for a long while, as Al tried to absorb what had just been laid out.

"…why didn't you tell me?" was all he could think to ask. He felt stunned. She had lived with them for months, back in Risenburg, and she'd never breathed a word.

"It doesn't make me proud that I was a part of it. If I could, I would gladly forget it."

All the fight had gone out of her, and she just slumped. She looked as though she was waiting for him to scream at her.

It took all his self-control not to. Al yanked hard at his ponytail instead.

"I can understand that, but…Rose, the Event was monumental! That was when my brother first went AWOL. You know that. You—"

_Underground tunnels. _

_Rose, leading her people through them._

_An array, on a level the world had never seen._

_His brother, vanishing, and with him, the memories of Al's old life._

_Rose, leading him up through the earth, at the beginning of his new one._

The final piece slid sideways into place and Al looked at her in horror.

"It was here. Wasn't it? That place where I first woke up. We were in Lior."

He was aware that his voice was precariously close to breaking. He didn't care. To hell with it. Al felt like he was reeling, like the room was spinning right out from under him. All this time…everyone…

They had all sworn up and down they had no idea what had caused Ed's disappearance, anything about it, that they would help him any way they could.

"Is that why those armored things came up out of the ground? Because there's a whole other city buried under us, right now?"

Rose was speaking but her voice carried no meaning. Everything was a buzz. Rose had been sitting on this. The whole time.

"You lied to me."

Now awakened, the demon of his anger could not be reasoned with. It gibbered within his chest, sunk in invisible claws. It felt like he was splitting in two.

"No, Al—"

"If you knew where the city was, why didn't you tell me?! I asked you so many times. Everyone else said I had dreamt it. I could have shown them—maybe then they would believe me--"

"Al, _it isn't here!_"

Anger bared its teeth, aimed for the jugular. It was like he was seeing the world through slow-motion, everything was red.

"Then where? You do know, don't you? _Tell me!_"

"ALPHONSE ELRIC!"

Al's teeth clicked together painfully as he missed the start of his next word. The light in the room seemed to fade, and he looked up to see a living wall of muscle between himself and Rose.

"Deplorable," Citizen Armstrong rumbled.

He was a different person without the smile. The man did not walk, he _loomed _forward into the room_. _Hands the size of ham-shanks squeezed into fists. Al was so used to the caricature, he had never appreciated just how powerful Armstrong was.

"Simply deplorable," the man rumbled. "I chanced inside because I thought I heard shouting…but to think I should find _you_, Alphonse, bullying a lady!"

Armstrong turned toward Rose, and his expression softened ever so slightly.

"Are you all right?"

"Yes, thank you," Rose said. She didn't look all right though, Al realized. She looked…frankly, terrified, and the shock was like cold water pouring down his back. Her nails were buried deep into the fabric of her armchair, and she was biting down on her lower lip so hard he could see groove marks in it. She hadn't run though. She had sat right there and taken it, the brunt of his anger.

She had stood her ground, and Alphonse knew shame.

"I'm sorry," he choked out, bowing low over his knees, as low as he could manage. His red hood flopped down over his face and he shoved it back up roughly. Right now, he didn't feel he deserved to wear his brother's coat.

_What kind of a hero throws tantrums?_

"It's all right," Rose said, though her voice was slightly faint. "Don't bow. You shouldn't have to apologize. You have a right to be angry."

Al straightened up but if anything, he felt worse.

"I didn't have the right to scream at you, though," he said. "Miss Rose…"

Rose shook her head firmly, and a bit of her strength seemed to return. The vulnerable light was there in her eyes but her expression was determined, and in that moment he loved her for it.

"It happened at Central," she said. "When your brother disappeared. What they now call Old Central…it isn't really the old part of the city at all. There is another layer to it, in a cavern underneath."

_--stairs leading on forever, down, down, and down, and a city like a wave, houses sliding down the sides of the world and smashing together in the center, to a music hall no one has seen for centuries, except for the things that live there, pale things, like fish's bellies turned up to rot--_

Rose was staring at him intently, like she could see through into his head, what he was seeing.

"That was where she took me, when the work at Lior was done," Rose whispered. "To her place below the city."

"Who did?" Al asked.

"The woman I told you about. The one who was a false prophet," Rose said. "I never knew her name. I was only to call her, 'master'."

Her legs were clamped together again and her body was trembling like a kite caught in a strong breeze. Armstrong placed one of his thick hands on her shoulder, kneaded it a little, as though bracing her. His palm was so large it entirely covered her deltoid.

"The children were hunting after their afternoon snacks," Armstrong suggested. "I left Bria in charge, but you do know how she goes on."

"I do," Rose murmured, and she reached up to squeeze his fingers very briefly. Something grown-up, something complicated passed between them for a moment, and then Rose peeled Armstrong's fingers away.

"They can go on a while longer," she said. "Al deserves to know."

She straightened up higher in her chair, pull her dress out from between her legs. Her eyes rose up to meet Al's again, and she looked older, older than he had ever seen her before.

"Your brother came for me. He saved me…and you, too. You were also a prisoner, I think. I don't…I don't exactly recall. It's…hard to remember."

Al nodded, though he got the feeling she meant that in a very different sense.

"A lot of things happened that I didn't understand, a lot of alchemy. What I did understand was…Edward died. He was attacked, he had a hole right through his chest, he was on the floor and dead. But you used alchemy somehow, to bring him back."

Al couldn't hardly breathe. He could picture it – he thought he could picture it – but was that truly memory, or morbid fascination? He could see his brother's eyes…those beautiful, unusual, golden eyes…could see them dimming. The very idea made him sick.

"But I brought him back," he parroted right back, trying to keep his lunch from coming back up.

"Yes, you did," Rose affirmed again. She seemed to understand. "And he was whole, Al. He had human arms and legs, everything…"

"And?"

He was on the edge of his seat and he couldn't even recall moving. It all came down to this. The part of the story they had never told him, the part that he'd always felt lingering around the edges of his life. All his dreams, and nightmares.

"It was because you were gone," she said quietly. "He came, and you went. He asked me to take Wrath and go for help…and the rest, you know."

"I came back…and he went," Al whispered.

"Yes," Rose said. Her eyes flicked downward to the hem of her shift. "Now you know. Your master thought it meant that he just isn't anywhere, anymore. Because he gave himself for you."

Armstrong rumbled something soft, and this time she accepted his hand when he proffered it.

"But I brought him back once," Al said, mustering the will to speak. The will to do anything. Right now, he felt frozen.

To be the subject of that much love was almost unendurable. How could he be expected to bear it? The brother he remembered was just plain old Ed. Not the Fullmetal Alchemist, not the Hero of the People. Selfish at snack times. A blanket hog at night. Even wearing his brother's old coat, even out here retracing his footsteps… His brother's shadow just cast so far, it felt like he would never make it back to its source.

But he had to try. If there was anything he _was_ sure of, it was that he had to try. He owed his brother too much to let him go, and loved him too dearly to want to.

"If I brought him back once, I could do it again," he said slowly. "Because I've seen him."

"At the cost of your own life," Citizen Armstrong said sharply.

_If that's what it takes,_ a part of him thought, but did not say. The impulse was deeply disturbing.

Rose was looking at him again as though his thoughts were no secret. Her face held nothing but the deepest kind of sorrow.

"You have a right to be mad," she said. "But now you know, why we tried to keep it from you."

"Yes," Al said, swallowing tightly. "Now I know."

Love, in all forms, was hard to endure.

---

***


	6. Chapter 6

***

The more time stretched on, the easier it was for Alfons to imagine all the bad things that could be happening. Dr. Kessler could be discussing how displeased he was with Alfons's boldness, have him dismissed. The soldier guarding him – pardon, _escorting _him, with a gun and all – could decide to dismiss him in a more permanent fashion. The ceiling could collapse, dismissing them all. Any number of things _could_ happen, as long as the situation remained a mystery.

Alfons tried to stay calm and avoid staring too openly at his guard's half-melted face.

"Ah, _there _you are! Alfons, my boy!"

A voice cut in from above and Alfons looked up eagerly, though as always, he heard Kessler long before he saw him. The man's deep baritone preceded him as he strode out from one of the doors on the landing, looking as jovial and nonchalant as always.

Only the twin spots of bright color in his cheeks hinted that perhaps he had not just 'happened across' Alfons the way his greeting made it seem. Kessler's preferred pace was an indolent amble. The man was a textbook example of 'always busy, but never in a hurry'.

"I would have been out sooner, but I hadn't been expecting you," Kessler said, peering down over the railing.

"My apologies!"

Unlike Kessler, Alfons found himself needing to shout. The good doctor was most charitably described as a commanding presence, and he had a particular brand of elocution that was often audible despite pneumatic rivet busters, metal grinders, and all other attempts to tune him out.

"I was headed into the hanger and I thought I'd pay you a call. I would have rung ahead had I known it would be a problem."

Alfons was still wary of the gun in Melting Cheek's hands, its hungry little mouth gaping at a point just below his left clavicle. The guard had not moved an inch since Kessler had appeared. If anything, he was making an effort to look even more serious about his duties, lest this man from the higher circles find his performance lacking.

Kessler descended the stairs two at a time, eyes fixed on Alfons, puffing just a bit with the effort.

"Come now, there's no need for all this," he said, waving a hand impatiently at Melting Cheek's gun. The soldier looked incredulous, but Kessler would not be deterred.

"Stand down," he ordered and put a hand on the very barrel of the man's gun to push it away. "Alfons here is no threat at all. I can personally vouch for his identity."

For the first time in his life, Alfons realized he might be genuinely happy to see Dr. Kessler.

"He wasn't on the list," the soldier grumbled, but at least he had the decency to look contrite. The malleable half of his face grimaced and he dropped his weapon down immediately.

"Then you've got the wrong list. I'll have someone send an update." Kessler said shortly. "You may return to your post." The way he said 'may' implied that he actually meant 'must', with severe penalties to anyone who happened to disagree.

The guard nodded curtly and then saluted them both, though his gaze lingered on Alfons a second longer than was comfortable. Alfons watched him walk away with similar unease. The Thule Society was gaining in members, gaining in visible assets, gaining in layers of bureaucracy and complexity…to what end? Alfons wasn't a fool. He'd certainly considered that this supposed 'society of visionaries' might be a front for a rebel movement. And he'd told himself that it really didn't matter. The current government was worthless, a shriveled fruit certain to fall sooner rather than later. As long as they wanted to build his rockets, he hadn't cared who was funding him. He wanted his creations, his sweat, his blood and tears, to go down in history as one of the world's greatest triumphs, attributed forever to a proud German.

But if the Thule's focus was now truly militaristic in nature…who was to say they would continue to fund him at all? Who was to say they wouldn't abandon his creations? And if that was all that was to become of his legacy…who said he should continue to stay with them?

Alfons drew himself up, up, up to his proper height.

"I've come to speak with you about the rocket," he told Kessler. "I'm afraid it cannot wait any longer."

"I see."

Kessler reached into his breast pocket and retrieved a handkerchief half again as large as his ham-sized hand. He was sweating profusely about the face and neck. Alfons watched with disgusted fascination as his boss dabbed at the rivers of moisture running down his neck.

"Let's walk and talk a bit, shall we?" Kessler offered. His smile seemed pained. "I'm afraid you've caught me at a bad moment, I'm not sure how much time I can spare, but I'll try to--"

"You said when the team started work that this project was 'central' to the Society's interests," Alfons interrupted. "Surely you can afford a few minutes."

"Well, yes, of course, normally I could – but I'm scheduled to appear at a very important function, the best I could do would be to ask you to accompany me there."

"That wouldn't be a problem."

Kessler's eyes glimmered intently for a second. He looked as though he were privately calculating something. Alfons could feel the man's gaze crawling over his skin, weighing him, judging him, particularly his fair hair and eyes. It left him with the strong urge to scratch.

"Actually, I've been wanting to introduce you to some of my colleagues for a while," Kessler announced. "I know you haven't chosen to attend any of the Society-sponsored lectures-"

"-I've been in the lab-"

"-but," Kessler held up a hand, "I'm sure they would be willing to overlook that." His patronizing tone suggested this was some great favor; Alfons thought it a pittance at best. He had opted out of the Thule's most recent meeting because he was certain he already knew the point. Pompous old men who wanted to speak more on how destined for greatness they were, instead of actually doing something about the Jews and Communists and war profiteers. He got that drovel straight from Kessler all the time, he didn't need to attend formalized lectures. Pamphlets in his inbox were bad enough.

Then again, given the presence of the soldiers…the recent, dramatic swell in membership…perhaps the Thule was finally ready for more push and less pomp. All the more reason for him to understand what it was they were planning for his rocket. Two months ago, Alfons had taken it on faith that the Society meant to show off his creation at one of their soirees, invite other notables from the academic world just to prove that they were Great Minds and Great Investors working for the common good of Germany.

Now…

"I appreciate your generosity," Alfons said at last. "I admit, I have become more curious about the Society's activities of late."

Kessler beamed as though he thought that was a good thing. He gestured toward the stairs with a meaty hand.

"Come with me then," he said, all smiles, though the sweat still pouring down around his face made him seem nervous. Why should his supervisor, of all people, be nervous? Alfons was starting to feel the butterflies of nausea flitting about at the pit of his own stomach. Things were wrong here, he couldn't help but think, and going wrong-er all the time.

The guard with the disfigured face watched them as they mounted the stairs. His eyes followed them all the way up.

***

The interior section of the villa turned out to be disappointingly normal. After so much buildup, Alfons had half been expecting for Kessler to usher him into a wholly separate universe, where fairies danced and served ambrosia to the Thule's _Ubermensch _in brandy snifters the size of thimbles. Instead, what he found was…corridors, mostly. Alfons followed Kessler dutifully through a maze of long, narrow stucco hallways and tried not to look too disappointed. Whatever secrets this place kept, it did not keep them in the open.

Although it was clear they were in a hurry, thankfully, he didn't need to beg Kessler's indulgence very much. Alfons focused on extending his long legs as much as possible on each stride, to ensure he was covering maximum distance for minimum effort. Kessler himself seemed to be in poor shape for athletic activities, which helped. His breath whistled like a tea kettle, and more than once the man stopped to cough into an elegant kerchief. Alfons took advantage of the breaks to catch up with his own breathing.

The man looked unusually wan as well, Alfons realized. Kessler's formerly ruddy skin was a blotchy, sickly white. The only color to him was the flush across his cheeks. A look that Alfons was unfortunately intimately familiar with.

For a moment, the time bomb ticking in his chest seemed audible.

_Could I have given it to him?_

Alfons watched the man cough with a growing sense of dread. He didn't _like_ Kessler much, but nor could he find it in him to hate the man. Especially not enough to wish him dead. Alfons sunk down a bit as he guiltily tried to decide – wet cough or dry? Fever flush or exertion?

And then there had been Noa, literally held at arm's length by the men with her. Driven like an animal, with poles. He was starting to think of himself that way too. No longer a man, but a plague rat, a monster; a horrid little beast who cared not for the suffering of others, but contaminated everyone around him.

"Almost there," Kessler huffed, then thumped himself hard across the chest. He coughed again, and horribly, laughed at Alfons.

"Though I do believe you've given me your cold, young man! Tsk tsk!"

"…sorry, sir," Alfons said. And he was, desperately so.

Kessler gave him a strange look, and Alfons forced himself to grin. He could only imagine what his expression must have been like.

Thinking of Noa reminded him though, and although he knew he was probably already damned for it, Alfons could not help but ask.

"Sir, while I was waiting for you," Alfons said, "there were some men who were escorting a gypsy?"

"Oh?"

Kessler's tone seemed nonchalant, but his beady eyes were very sharp all of a sudden, like a crow eyeing a choice bit of tin foil. Alfons wondered what that meant for him.

"Forgive me if it's not my place sir, I was just concerned because – you know gypsies. They aren't exactly known to be trustworthy domestics."

He made sure not to mention that he knew her, though it didn't help him feel any more at ease. Even though he was at work, he couldn't help that paranoid feeling that everyone could see he was associated with the girl, like his thoughts were transparent.

At home, in his neighborhood, everyone _did_ know. The widows at the flower shop twittered about his 'guest' every time he came in, and Constable Hughes had read him the riot act. It hadn't helped to explain that Noa was Edward's fault. From their point of view, Edward was Alfons's fault.

Alfons, the loner, consorting with thieves and eccentrics.

Kessler was still sweating like a stuck pig, and the kerchief was no longer doing any good at all in staunching the rivers of perspiration pouring down his face.

"If you're worried about your possessions," Kessler grunted, "I can personally guarantee you have nothing to fear. Security is, as you know, of the utmost importance."

A comforting answer, if that had actually been what Alfons was concerned about. He cleared his throat ever so slightly, trying to fight back the maddening tickle of a cough, and tried again.

"Is something the matter with her, though? The men with her were holding her with poles…" Alfons ended lamely, not sure how far he dared to go. He wanted to know once and for all, but at the same time he was terrified to give name to the specter. It felt like suspicion might come hammering down at any moment.

Alfons, the loner with the delicate constitution. Alfons, who was always so pale, with bruised eyes even late in the day.

There was a pause – and was it him, or did Kessler appear to be mulling his answer over? He could practically see the gears turning inside his mind.

Kessler's thick hands tightened at his sides.

"I wouldn't concern yourself with the gypsy," he said. There was a hint of forced cheerfulness bleeding into his voice. "She is, as you guessed, a servant, to the Society. We simply take precautions…for security's sake, of course. Though as you experienced yourself, sometimes our men are simply too good at what they do."

Again, his piggy eyes were scouring Alfons's face for a reaction, almost desperately, it seemed. Alfons schooled his face into a careful, non-judgmental indifference. That was one trick he'd had to learn, living with Edward.

"Indeed. Your guards had me at gunpoint for quite a while."

"Which was absolutely ludicrous," Kessler huffed. He looked genuinely apologetic, which Alfons was grateful to see. "And I will be certain to have them reprimanded. Their zeal is appreciated, but highly unnecessary."

"And it's necessary for a _woman_?" Alfons pried again. He tried to act offended that Kessler would imply a mere woman to more of a threat than himself, clearly a strong, healthy young man who in no way was associated with the creeping death. "I should think you'd get rid of her, if she were that much of a problem."

"Some servants need a firm hand, Alfons," Kessler frowned back. He looked like a mournful professor, disappointed by his star pupil. "It's our duty as men of better reason to guide those of lesser capacity. The gypsy race cannot help their baser tendencies."

'Guide those of lesser capacity'… Did that mean they were keeping her as a charity case? Was she even ill at all? Alfons had the disquieting realization that perhaps the Society really was that zealous in their distaste for the lower races. He might not particularly care to associate with gypsies, but he'd never gotten the sense that they were so unilaterally dangerous that they needed to be driven like cattle.

Unless Noa had _done_ something, perhaps taken something? This was an opulent villa, far grander than his rundown little flat. Except if that were the case, why not call the local constable and have him deal with it? Why the business with the poles? How could Noa have come here in the first place? She couldn't have wandered this far into the country by chance.

"Of course," Alfons said, licking his lips. "Though one might question the 'reason' in keeping servants one cannot trust."

He eyed Kessler sideways, watching him closely for a reaction, but the man disappointingly failed to do anything but mop at his brow. He seemed increasingly nervous the farther they progressed. Obnoxious as he was, Alfons felt a pang of sympathy for him.

"I must have caused you a lot of trouble, interrupting like this," he said quietly. "I'm sorry."

"Don't worry about it," Kessler waved a hand, but his voice was short, and Alfons did not bring it up again.

They rounded one final corner and Kessler reached inside his lapel pocket to retrieve a thick ring of silver keys. They were standing before a particularly elegant door, heavier and thicker than the ones they had passed along the hall. It was fashioned from a particularly dark wood – something exotic, perhaps? With that lacquered finish on it, it almost seemed closer to black than brown…dark wood, that seemed to swallow all light…

_-except for the yellow light, oh god that insane bruise-light, and behind it now are eyes, the watchers that don't sleep-_

"Alfons?"

"Yessir?"

Kessler was looking up at him, one hand stroking his thick moustache, the other clasped firmly around a slender key.

"If you could wait here for a moment," the little man said. He literally reeked of nervousness now, noxious and rank in the close space of the corridor, the rancid stench of an animal waiting for the butcher's knife.

"It would be prudent of me to let the Director know you are coming. You wouldn't mind waiting here a moment, would you?

"Of course."

Kessler eyed the door as though it might eat him.

"She's rather…particular, at times, when it comes to surprises. Though I'm sure she will be delighted to meet you!" he added hastily.

"She?" was all Alfons had time to ask, for at that moment, the inky doors burst open.

He had the briefest impression of a grand cathedral, for surely that must be what lay beyond those doors. The corridor opened up into an inexplicably huge atrium, ringed with what seemed to be windows at the far side. This must be the large dome he had previously seen from outside the building, a circular atrium. Sometimes, the excesses of the rich were truly astounding.

What commanded more of his attention, though, was the woman striding toward them. She was short but powerfully built, in a fitted suit jacket with shoulders padded so heavily they extended far past the limits of her actual arms. She was a handsome woman, neither stunningly beautiful nor dreadfully plain, and her blond hair was cropped in a similar style to Miss Gracia's, with a hint of natural wave. She was also wearing men's trousers, a perverseness so unexpected that his eyes jumped back and forth from her chest to her legs, just to be sure that she really was a she.

"Director," Kessler said, all but simpering. Alfons just gaped.

The woman pulled up short as the doors swung shut behind her. She crossed her arms, visibly nonplussed.

"Dr. Kessler," the woman acknowledged. Her voice was calm, but it was the sort of calm that came before a thunderstorm. Her pale eyes seemed to flash.

"And whom is this?"

She had an ageless face. She could have been anywhere between twenty and forty, and he had absolutely no idea. Alfons swallowed hard, wondering how he ought to introduce himself.

"This is Mr. Alfons Heiderich, Director," Kessler cut in, solving the problem for him. "He's the Aerospace Engineer?"

"_Chief_ aerospace engineer," Alfons felt it important to use his title whenever possible. Many of the Society members were academics, and academics loved to spend their free time coming up with new and innovative ways to describe each other. "Assistant Professor in Charge of Experiment Design." "Co-chair of Quality Control." In this woman's case, "Head Secretary of Fashion and Shoulder pad Overhaul."

"Ah!"

The woman's stern look softened a little around the edges, and she unfolded her arms, extended a hand.

"I apologize for my rudeness. How do you do?" she asked, and there was no choice but to shake. Her grip was surprisingly strong, for a lady's. Alfons had to force himself to keep his eyes fixed on her face. He had the sense it would be an extremely poor thing to be seen ogling her chest, even if his intentions were pure.

"I am Dietlinde Eckart, Director of the Society." She flashed him an attractive, if brief, smile, showed a hint of two pointed white canines before hiding them again.

"My pleasure, ma'am," Alfons replied, releasing her hand. Kessler was looking back and forth between the two of them, very visibly relieved.

"And what brings you to the inner chambers this morning?" she asked him, though her eyes quite obviously flicked to Kessler. The man reddened even further, embarrassment adding to the stain of exertion in his cheeks.

"Mr. Heiderich is interested in learning more about the Society," Kessler explained hurriedly. "He was kind enough to pay a call on his day off…and as per our previous discussion, I thought perhaps if you had a few minutes to spare, you of course would be the perfect one to introduce him."

"I would specifically like to discuss the Society's plans for the rocketship premiere," Alfons cut in. "The first craft you commissioned has been completed, and is ready to be tested."

Kessler's frantic glare said that he ought not to have mentioned it, but to hell with this. He was fast running out of patience with this whole strange situation. The death dogging him at every breath felt closer by the day, and the more that he learned, the more the whole situation disturbed him. Those guards… Kessler's idea of security, as though every commune of activists needed men in uniform to protect them.

"I would like to arrange a time to have the craft moved outdoors, where it can be launched," he said, staring the strange woman down. He was nervous enough that he could feel his chest start to contract, but he clenched his hands and willed himself not to cough, willed himself to get through this. "With all due respect, ma'am, in order to move forward, we need to test our current design that we may improve upon it. And the new commission—"

"Alfons—" Kessler reached out for his wrist, as though he were physically trying to steer him away from the subject, but Alfons slipped out of his sweaty grip easily.

"The new commission? Is frankly impossible," Alfons said, and he was proud of himself that only a hint of the venom he felt came through in his voice.

"The theory is right – I've actually been considering liquid oxygen as an oxidizing agent for some time, and I'm convinced liquid fuels are the way of the future – but right now we don't have the ability to store it in a rocketship. Not in a light enough fashion, anyway. Oxygen is corrosive, it makes metals brittle. We'd need a whole new alloy to stand up to it and still be thin enough to let the craft lift off the ground. And the materials are exceedingly expensive, and require special handling…"

He trailed off when he realized he was just babbling endlessly, uselessly, about the technical aspects of the project. She wouldn't have any idea what he was saying, and as cathartic as it felt to rant about the absurdity of it all, this was the Society's 'Director'...the way Kessler was deferring to her said that she wasn't just in charge of afternoon tea.

Eckart was looking at him with an amused expression, her full lips quirked up as though she knew something he did not.

"You're worried about the viability of your project?"

"Yes ma'am."

The director nodded.

"And you came out to argue about it, am I correct? You must be very dedicated," she said.

"Yes ma'am…" Alfons replied, trying hard not to look insulted. What did she think, that he could do such a complex project as a lark? Of _course_ he was dedicated, he had his blood, sweat and tears in that baby.

"I believe Dr. Kessler is right, perhaps it would be good for us to chat."

She turned to Kessler and gave him a polite, if inexplicable, brush-off.

"The Collections team is waiting for you to debrief them," she told Kessler, jerking her head toward the inky doors. "I had intended to be there too, but it's not important. Let me know what the news is."

"Yes ma'am!"

On the whole, Dr. Kessler looked very happy to be dismissed, Alfons thought. The man all but jogged over to shove his key into the lock. He had a hand on the doorknob even before the key was turned.

He gave Alfons one last, strangely relieved look, and then disappeared through the door as soon as the crack was large enough for his bulk to fit through.

Eckart turned to Alfons, looked him right in the eye. Her watery blue eyes were deep enough to fill oceans.

"Come with me, Mr. Heiderich," she said, smiling down like a sculpture. "I'd like to show you something."

***

Eckart lead him back along the corridor several paces, much faster than Dr. Kessler had. Alfons kept up gamely, though he could feel himself starting to wheeze. His lungs were like a pair of billows in his chest, fanning the flames that were searing him with each additional inflation.

"I've heard a lot about you," the director said in a conversational tone. She did not make eye contact, but continued to charge briskly forward, clearly a person used to being followed and obeyed.

"All good things, of course."

"I'm glad to hear that." Alfons managed to speak without choking, but his eyes were beginning to water. He was starting to wonder how much more of this he could endure. This strange, trouser-clad woman walked like a man too, with purpose and speed.

Eckart pulled up abruptly next to a tall oak door, and Alfons tried not to sigh in relief. The door was labeled, he noticed, with a small white placard. _Laboratory Space #7_, it proclaimed.

Below it, more troubling, was a stark, machine-typed warning:

_Hazardous Materials. Authorized Entry Only. _

_GUARDS POSTED. DO NOT ENTER._

Eckart seemed to read the questions in his eyes. She offered a gracious smile.

"The Society sponsors many types of scientific research," she explained. "All of it cutting edge. Like your rocketship."

Alfons got the sense that this disclosure was meant to win his trust. He made sure to smile and nod.

"Naturally, we have need to keep these things a secret." She rubbed a thumb briefly over the word 'guard' on the sign. "The technology we're working with is years beyond anything the world has ever seen."

"For the glory of the nation," Alfons said, though the words sounded hollow now to him. All that he had seen so far today…the armed guards, Kessler's sweating face…Noa…the pieces were adding up to a whole he was no longer sure he believed in.

_Your sponsors are planning something,_ Edward had tried to tell him. _War._ And even though it had been couched in the terms of Edward's usual madness, the vexing thing was that once again, it was looking like Edward might in fact be right. Edward had known.

_And if Edward had knowledge of the Society…if Noa was here…_

_Could Edward be here somewhere, too? _

Eckart turned and leaned back against the door, hands on her hips, obscuring the placard. Shielding the lab from him.

"What I am about to show you is proprietary," she said. "And we are at a very crucial stage in the development. If I am to show you this…I will need your word that no one else will know."

That came uncomfortably close to impugning his honor. Alfons clenched his jaw.

"I signed a non-disclosure agreement when you commissioned me to build the rocketship. You can ask anyone in the aerospace community, not a soul knows."

Another reason to be concerned. He had put all his eggs into this one last, rickety basket, in a hopes that he might be able to realize his legacy…but outside the Society, no one even knew he had this contract. Miss Gracia thought he was working for a professor. His family was dead. Edward was the only one who had known the importance of what he was doing here, and now Edward was gone.

The corner of Eckart's lip quirked up, again, as though laughing at some private joke.

"Indeed, you have proved very trustworthy. It's time the Society trusted you as well."

She turned away from him, still smiling in that bemused fashion Alfons was increasingly coming to dislike. She did not reach for keys to unlock the door but instead raised her arm, rapped her knuckles thrice against the door frame, and it opened immediately. There were indeed guards posted just inside the door, two of them at least, both wearing that same dyed-brown uniform. One of them held the door open for the director. The other saluted. Alfons followed her in, wondering not for the first time if he was only digging himself deeper.

Not that it mattered much, he supposed. His grave was already waiting for him.

The door closed behind them and the guards moved to stand at either side of it, stiffly, each one the very picture of military discipline. Alfons could feel their eyes boring into the back of his head.

The 'laboratory' itself was exceedingly sparse, nothing like the work spaces he had been accustomed to at the University. The outer edges of the room were ringed with filing cabinets and crates, a plethora of fire extinguishers, and chairs here and there holding personal belongings but no other furniture. The center of the room was completely bare, save for six large circles painted on the floor at evenly spaced intervals. There were a few men huddled around one of them, looking down at a pile of…something at the center. The stench of ozone was absolutely everywhere.

The researchers were wearing thick protective gloves and lab goggles, though a couple of them had the eyepieces pushed up onto their foreheads. They seemed to be debating something vigorously amongst themselves.

"Gentlemen," she acknowledged, and all of them immediately fell silent, made room in the circle for her. Whatever she might be 'director' of, her authority here was abundantly clear.

"I would like to introduce Mr. Alfons Heiderich. He's the aerospace engineer in charge of designing our rocketship."

There was a collected murmur of how do you do. Alfons ducked his head in acknowledgment, not sure what he ought to say or do. These men were all older, and more than a few of them were eyeing him in obvious disbelief. He straightened up a little taller and stuck his chest out, set his jaw in a firm line and tried to think 'older'. If only he were capable of a beard like his father's. That was another axis on which fate had cheated him. The best he had ever achieved was a ratty patch of down across his chin.

"I need a space," the director said, and a couple of the men nodded toward one of the circles on the far side of the room. She gestured for Alfons to follow her to it.

"A broom as well, please."

Alfons was still trying to figure out what the lump was that the men were experimenting with. It looked a bit like metal that had been liquefied and stretched like spun taffy, then cooled into an amorphous mass. It had a lustrous finish to it. Alfons wondered if it were actually some kind of glass. The confusing part was that as far as he could tell, the room had no heat source at all. Yet the material must have been heated…because the test area's boundary line was not just dark paint. It looked as though the shape was charred into the floorboards.

"Mr. Heiderich, if you would?"

Eckart was waiting for him with two of the men, looking rather impatient.

"Of course, ma'am," he said, and hurried to join them.

They were now standing at one of the empty circles, a space perhaps three meters in diameter. A bold scrawl of red paint next to it noted that this section of the floor was 'Test Area Five'. It too bore deep gouges and what looked like burn marks at the edges.

Eckart directed the men to sweep the circle clean with a big corncob broom, then seized it and tossed it to Alfons.

"Mr. Heiderich?"

"Ma'am?"

"I want you to break that."

Alfons stared at the wooden broom handle for a long moment, not comprehending in the slightest. He figured he must have heard her wrong.

"You want me to break your _broom_?"

The men around them snickered openly. A few of them exchanged knowing grins. Again, it was as though they were all in on the same joke – one he wasn't privy to.

"Yes," Eckart replied, and her smile was just as broad as the rest of them, anticipating and eager.

"Into as many pieces as you like. Just make sure they're all in there," she gestured at the 'test area' with a great flourish, obviously enjoying the spectacle she was creating. She reminded him of a ringmaster at the circus.

Feeling increasingly put upon, Alfons hefted the broom up and snapped it in half over his knee. The thin wood made a satisfying crack as it gave, and he broke each of the resulting pieces in half again for good measure, then looked up to judge the crowd's reaction. A paranoid part of him kept conjuring the image of Noa, fenced in by poles not unlike the shaft of a broomstick. The jagged edges of the sticks he'd made looked like weapons.

"Set them there and stand back," Eckart said, waving an impatient hand at him. Alfons dumped the pile of broomstick bits into the center of the test area and stepped back over the boundary line, waiting to see what came next.

The director walked over to one of the filing cabinets pressed against the wall and withdrew a single sheet of paper from one of its many hanging files. A respectful hush went over the crowd as she returned with it. Alfons strained to see what was so special about it, but from the angle he was standing at, all he could see was the blank backside of the sheet. Whatever secrets it held, apparently they only filled one side of one page.

"You said the charge we have given you is impossible," Eckart said. She was standing directly opposite the circle from him, staring at him, clearly meant him to answer. Alfons nodded on cue and she beamed at him.

"But the theory is there, correct? Dr. Kessler has informed me you have come up with several hypotheses regarding liquid propulsion systems in the past."

"Correct," he replied as he could tell she wanted him to. This was the director's show, and it was increasingly clear his participation was required if he wanted to learn anything.

"The problem isn't a dearth of ideas, it's practical application. To achieve the kind of thrust you're talking about – the force that lifts the craft from the ground," he translated, unsure of his audiences' jargon level, "you would need a constant supply of an oxidizing agent – a chemical, like liquid oxygen – and it would have to be injected into the combustion chamber -- the place where the fuel is being ignited -- at an incredibly high pressure. So far, no one in the astronautics community has found a way to do that. Liquid oxygen has to be kept under a hundred and eighty degrees Celsius, and it's prone to explosions if you're not careful…and it's expensive, as I said previously. I've never had the luxury of being able to use it."

Because the University was uninterested in funding his 'science fiction dreams', that was, especially not in the hell that was the shattered remnants of the financial system. He felt the need to keep harping on the expense, not only because the bottom line was the bit that the others were most likely to comprehend, but because there was a chance they would be able to give him the funding. A part of him was starting to expect that Eckart was going to turn that paper around and show him a bank note in some foreign currency actually worth a damn. That would be a dream come true.

Except, that pile of broom shards…that still made no sense at all. Not even as a loyalty test. Alfons tried to shift discretely to the side to take a peek at what she was holding, but Eckart chose that moment to wave the paper with a flourish, high up over her head.

"What if I told you there was a way to take your oxygen from the air itself? Not by fractional distillation, but instantly, right in the center of your combustion chamber? In whatever quantity you needed, for however long you need it. Air separated on the atomic level."

She knew what fractional distillation was, which was fascinating. The rest was science fiction, and he told her so.

Eckart brandished the paper again, and this time, he thought he caught the faintest impression of dark pen lines shining through the sheet from the overhead lights.

"Ours is a technology, Mr. Heiderich, that may seem like science fiction, but I assure you, what we are developing is real. I would ask you to keep an open mind."

She set the sheet down right at the center of the test area, on top of the pile of broomstick remains, and Alfons's heart turned over in his chest, because _he knew this_.

Right in the center of an otherwise unassuming piece of paper was a stark glyph, a circle bisected by a large triangle, with several other unrecognizable symbols interspersed in the union of the two larger shapes. He thought he could pick out the roman numeral two, and perhaps, a crescent moon? Not that it matter. The details paled in comparison with the fundamental truth: this was an alchemical symbol, what Edward had called an "array". Alfons had seen too many of them not to recognize the basic structure, those damned polygons superimposed on circles, physical symbols of what was wrong with his friend's mind. Symptoms of Edward's disease.

"The ancients once labored over the pseudoscience known as alchemy," the director said. It seemed she was searching his face. "They believed that with sufficient understanding of the art, man would be capable of anything."

Eckart reached out and a man handed her a phial and an eye dropper that Alfons had not noticed him procure. She unscrewed the cap and plunged the tip in, squeezed out exactly one drop of a dark liquid down onto the broken broom.

"They were right."

The woman pressed her other hand to the very edge of the paper and then it was on fire. There was no other way to explain it. The lines of the array lit up like the hottest coals of a fire, a white so bright it was edging into blue. Tendrils of electricity started crackling all around the woman, almost to the edges of the boundary lines on the floor, and Alfons could smell ozone so sharply it seared at his lungs. The symbols turned orange next, then yellow, then white themselves, and then the entire paper was glowing so brightly that he almost couldn't see what happened next.

Inexorably, impossibly, the shattered pieces of the broom shaft writhed on the floor and began to slide toward each other, twisted around each other, as though they were made of putty, not wood. The glow was racing over them accompanied by an audible crackling sound, as though the broom was burning – but there was absolutely no smoke and there seemed to be more of it now, not less. Alfons watched in awe as the broom's handle slowly but surely grew up once again from the lowly bristled head at its bottom, glowing white but otherwise in the exact same shape it had been before he'd savaged it.

The array flared once and then faded, leaving spots to dance in his eyes, and questions to dance over his heart.

Eckart stood and hefted the newly repaired tool in one hand, looking slightly paler than before but her smile was radiant. The lab technicians dutifully clapped.

"How was that for empirical evidence?"

"…it can't be real," he gasped. Choked hard, wound up coughing. He was beyond caring about suppressing it, beyond rational thoughts like self-preservation. He had just watched…he had just watched every known law of physics be turned on its head. How was he supposed to feel? She had applied no energy to that system…unless the floor itself held a forge beneath it, but in that case, how had she not been burned? How had the wood not been burned? How had wood - which he _knew _was wood, he had touched it himself, _splintered _it himself - twisted back together so seamlessly? It was a trick, some kind of parlor game, it had to be.

It had to be a trick, or surely he was going mad.

Eckart strode over and thrust the broom into his hands, forcing him to acknowledge that it was, impossibly enough, solid and whole once more. He ran his fingers up and down the shaft in the places where he'd snapped it and didn't catch so much as a splinter.

The director seemed to know what he was thinking. "If you like, we can run the demonstration again," she said. "I'll get a pen and you can write your name on it, if you want to be sure this isn't sleight-of-hand."

There was a slight murmur of discontent from the researchers around them and a mousy little man stepped forward. He looked to be some kind of authority figure himself, the way the other men deferred to him. Alfons knew the type – he was a small man, but probably endowed with big brain, if he was research lead, and threw that fact around to make up for his other 'short'-comings.

"Director, I apologize, but that phial's nearly empty," Mousy told her. "And we've got other arrays slated to test."

And there they were using the same damn word. "Array". Like a series of numbers, or a collection of reference books, or a regiment of soldiers. "Array" was supposed to mean science, logic, order. Nothing about this witchcraft was orderly.

"Dr. Kessler shall be arriving shortly with fresh stock. You should be more than set for the next two days," Eckart told the discontented research lead. He seemed to cheer up immediately and offered no further resistance. The director turned her gaze back to Alfons, looking very pleased with herself.

Alfons was only half-listening. He had no idea what was in the phial they were going on about, but that was the least of the many questions the past few minutes had raised.

"How?" he asked finally. "That energy had to come from somewhere. Thermodynamics requires it. There was so much light…"

Energy, in the form of light and sound and motion…but energy had to be conserved. For all that to have happened, something should have been consumed, petrol or electricity or even the broom itself. But not even the paper with the array on it showed signs of degradation.

"That's part of our work here," Eckart said. "We've been trying to determine the mechanic behind transmutation, though so far, we haven't had much success. We have a number of reliable, reproducible properties that I can detail, though."

She smiled at him, the way one might do a favored student, or a pet.

"For now, it's easiest to think of alchemy like gravity…a force that we can observe and categorize, but not entirely explain."

Alfons wondered if she'd thrown in the reference to the theory of gravity because she knew it was crucial to his own field.

"Such as?"

"The design of the array affects the type of transmutation. The skill and experience of the particular person activating said array affects the quality of the result. Not everyone is capable of activating an array in the first place," Eckart ticked them all off on the fingers of her right hand in rapid succession.

"All these things have been rigorously tested using proper experimental controls, and the effects are reproducible. I have the data if you'd like do your own analysis."

"I would," he said. Statistics, numbers, hard science…that was something he could believe in, at a time when he didn't trust his own senses. Too many miracles required faith, and faith unfortunately had yet to provide him solutions when he needed them.

"If the phenomenon can be studied scientifically, I'll believe it," he admitted.

Eckart nodded as though she'd expected that would be his response.

"Dr. Kessler has spoken highly of your analytical mind," she said. "We have been discussing whether we ought to test you. So far the ability has proved relatively rare among the general population, but there is a high correlation between alchemical and academic aptitude. As is beneficial to our overall work. One of the Society's guiding principles is to shed light on the mysteries of nature, how some races of man came to be so dominant in their stations. There may be a specific innate relation between high intelligence and important skills such as alchemy. If we can find a pattern in the breeding, it would benefit all humankind. Imagine, a world in which every man knew his best potential! We could shape the course of history – with our skills, create a better and brighter future!"

The men around her nodded in proud agreement, glad to be named part of this new intelligentsia. Alfons wasn't sure how he felt. The world seemed to be spinning too fast beneath him, and his heart was skipping beats in his chest.

"There's a test for this?"

If he too could do what Eckart had just done --assuming he even understood what it was that she had done, which seemed to be fusing many parts into a whole -- what possibilities would be open to him then? If he could line say, sheets of metal up next to each other and touch a funny bit of paper to make them seamless, how many rockets could he build then? If alchemy was real…

Edward had spoken of buildings springing up from his hands, geysers rising in the desert, entire cities demolished overnight. If this power was real, it would change the world as they all knew it.

Eckart came over and took the broom from his hands, stepped on one half and yanked up with her hands to break it once again. She set both pieces right next to each other in the center of the test area, and lined the edges up as though the broom were not actually broken. Alfons gaped after her, a little insulted that she had just ruined the miracle.

"If you have the talent, the array ought to respond to you. Even in a minute way," the woman said. She pulled out the eyedropper again and dabbed a bit of whatever her phial contained down onto the broken section of the broom handle.

"What is that?" Alfons remembered to ask this time, now that he was actively analyzing this insane procedure.

"A catalyst. For the time being, it is necessary, though we are looking into a number of work-arounds."

She lay the paper with the array down on top of the broken section very gently, then stood up and backed away from center stage for the first time since they had entered the room. She brushed her trouser legs off – such a very effeminate gesture, despite her male clothing – and gestured for Alfons to take her place. He did so with trepidation. The ring of faces surrounding him was becoming claustrophobic, expectant, hungry stares in every direction.

"Just touch your fingers to it and picture what the broom is supposed to be like," she instructed from the sidelines. "Imagine the broken places coming together, how smooth it used to be."

This was sounding like science fiction again – no, not even, this was pure and utter fantasy. But now that she had put the idea in his mind, there was no way he could avoid thinking about it. It was like trying to tell himself to forget something; the paradox was he had to remember what it was that he was supposed to be forgetting. The image of the broom was there in his mind, a long, perfectly cylindrical staff with a bundle of bristles at the bottom, as well as the memory of Edward, telling one of his apparently no longer crazy stories.

_Transmutation? It comes from within you…you know what you put in, and what you want to get out, and if there is equivalence, it flows the way you picture it._

_It's as easy as putting two hands together._

If he was going to join in this insanity, at least he had a fine guide. Alfons touched his hands together briefly, the way he so vividly remembered Edward doing, and pressed a careful hand down over the array.

He was so primed for something to happen that when it actually did, he nearly jerked away. A faint tingle ran through his fingertips the second they brushed the dark lines, like a current running through his hand, and his fingers spasmed violently away from the unusual sensation. Paper wasn't supposed to hold an electric charge. But then, broken wood wasn't meant to restitch itself either. Down was up, and up was down, night was day, and Edward would be so happy if he knew Alfons were trying this.

The lines sputtered light for a moment and there was a sputter of crackling, and then it was gone again, as his imagination strayed toward the thought of Edward's reaction instead of the broom. No, that wasn't right. He had to stay focused. Edward was amazing at focusing. Edward could calculate for hours without coming up for air, Edward drank books like water, if Edward were here…

Alfons took as deep a breath as his cramping lungs could hold and pictured the broom again, pictured Edward beside him, guiding him through this.

Light blazed up from beneath his fingers, enough to shine right through them, making his flesh seem transparent, highlighting bones like an x-ray. White light, blue light – yellow light, and then as his vision receded it felt as though that was all that he could see. There was a roaring in his ears now, a popping noise like the breaking of bones, and then an immense rushing sensation. His body was heat, his body was light, and he could see nothing, hear nothing, and he was hurtling toward something very quickly now, a darkness amid the yellow.

There was the image of the opening of doors, and something in there was reaching out toward him. Alfons cried out and stretched his arms out, wanting to embrace it back – and that was when it all started pulling away from him, as though he had reached the apex of his flight and now, inexorably he was falling back down.

_The broom, the broom!_ He tried to bring the image back, but it did not slow the free fall. The energy was bleeding out from him, a vast shuddering release like a long orgasm, terrifying in its beauty. He thought of Edward's face, and of flying, and then his eyes were his own again, and he was once again aware of his own body.

The array's light dulled, then dimmed, then went out completely.

For a moment, he didn't feel capable of movement. When he did, he first felt himself all over, making sure everything was all there. He was aware the process hadn't completed – it had _felt_ wrong, he'd lost his concentration, he'd let himself get distracted – but it had been enough, he realized with abject fascination. He pushed the paper to the side to see the broom handle was once again whole. It wasn't perfect – there was a visible seam, a hairline crack where the wood wasn't quite together – but when he pushed at it with shaking hands, the shaft held.

_I did it. I did._

…_Edward was _right_._

"Let me see!"

In an instant the director was on the floor with him, nudging him over. The broom handle was yanked from his hands.

A triumphant smile spread across Eckart's face as she held it up. Her compatriots crowded close too, examining what he had done.

"Not bad," the mousy researcher pronounced. "The junction is stable…"

Alfons just let them shove him, feeling strangely drained, like he wanted to lay down and sleep. He knew he ought to feel elated, energetic, any of the emotions associated with a breakthrough, but somehow fatigue was all there was, and a deep rattle in his chest. He leaned to one side and then found he could not stop. Luckily, the floor was comfortable.

"Alfons?"

Someone was calling his name, far above him, but it was too much work to speak. Lethargy washed over him in a crushing wave, and he closed his eyes against it. The only thought that was running through his head was that for the first time in his life, he thought he must understand what it was like to be Edward Elric.

If he told anyone now, who would believe him?

***


	7. Chapter 7

A/N: Sorry for the delay there – I had to take some time and devote it toward my Green Lion contest entry =) (For those who don't know, is having an FMA AU fanfic contest that I'm super excited about =) Check it out!)

Also, FFN seems to hate me. Has the login feature been inaccessible to anyone else lately?

* * *

"I'm sorry," Al said for what felt like the thousandth time, staring down into his cup of sagebrush tea.

They were out on the back veranda of the orphanage, a large semi-circular porch that had once served as a meeting place for Leto worshippers. Rose had explained that there had been a time when priests would give sermons out here under the sun, to bask beneath the sun god's presence and be humbled by His all-illuminating rays. Al was sitting next to Citizen Armstrong on one of the many long, curved marble pews, and although he followed no religion himself, he was feeling decidedly penitent.

Armstrong made a soft rumbling noise through his moustache, the way a horse might nicker to reassure a foal. His great bulk shifted as he leaned back to finish his own glass in three dramatic, audible gulps, and Al could feel the stone itself vibrate beneath them.

"Do you think she's okay?" Al asked. Rose had made herself scarce ever since their altercation and he wondered if his presence bothered her. She had appeared long enough to provide them both with tea, but then she was gone again, claiming that the children needed to be put down for a nap.

"Maybe I should book an inn for the night."

Armstrong favored him with an attempt at a quiet smile, five hundred watts instead of a thousand.

"Do not fear, Alphonse. Miss Rose is a kind and gracious woman. She would never bear a grudge over momentary unpleasantness. "

"I know," Al sighed. That only made it worse. He kept trying to tell himself it wasn't his fault, and part of him was still seething -- his family had all _lied_ to him, what kind of family was that? – but it wasn't fair for Rose alone to bear the brunt of his rage. He ought to feel angry at Winry and Gramma and Master Izumi too.

"You will always be welcome here. Any time you require it, a place will be made for you," Armstrong said quietly. The gentleness in his eyes offset the rest of his chiseled features.

"I appreciate it."

He took another sip of tea and tried not to grimace. Desert sage was a bitter plant and most of the time he couldn't drink it without at least three dollops of honey. He hadn't wanted to bother Rose any further though. Even when she'd brought them drinks, she'd still looked wan and strained around the eyes.

"The Liorans say that sageleaf tea is good for cleansing the body and soul," Armstrong commented. Al forced himself to smile at his cup.

"Oh?"

"Yes. They believe its noxious properties encourages the digestive process, and its bitterness makes men painlessly sweat out their cares!"

And Armstrong certainly was sweating, Al noted with minor horror. Whether an effect of the tea or the blazing sun above them, the man seemed to be glistening from head to toe. It was a miracle really, that Armstrong could go shirtless in this climate and not wind up broiled to a crisp. Al didn't dare go out without his arms and legs covered.

"Which is a noble sentiment, of course, ridding oneself of one's worries," Armstrong continued. "It is quite unhealthy for one to hold dark thoughts within. It poisons the body from the inside out."

Armstrong raised a thick eyebrow at him and Al ducked his head a little, uncomfortable. He could see what the man was angling for, but he wasn't at all going to take the bait. Whatever relationship they might have had Before, without any memory of it, this man was effectively a stranger. His quest already forced him to bare too many private things to strangers.

"The Ishvar have a ritual like that," he said lightly, ever-so-slightly changing the subject. "They set up these little sweat baths in the dunes. You dig a hole in the sand and make a fire pit with rocks, and put a tent up over it. Then you sit there and bake until you can't take anymore, and then you get out and rub down with a wet cloth."

Al shrugged. "I did it a couple of times, it works well enough. I think I prefer scrubbing with sand, though. I sweat enough in the desert as it is."

Another trick when there wasn't enough water to go around was to rub clean sand over one's body, which Al had taken to after a fashion. It left his face and body red from the abrasion, but he never got light-headed and overheated because of it.

"But does sand cleanse the spirit as well as the skin, young Alphonse? I think perhaps not!"

Armstrong tilted back on the bench and spread his huge arms wide, nearly sweeping Al off the bench in his eagerness to proletize. His biceps were nearly bigger than Al's face, Al realized in wonder as he ducked the one bulging next to his head.

"In this great state of Amestris, we advocate training oneself, do we not?" Armstrong inquired. "To hone oneself into a tool of the nation!"

"I guess…" He'd had a grade school teacher who had said things like that a lot, that it was the reason they must all learn their multiplication tables, the "glory of the state". Not that he had needed any encouragement to get good marks. Normal school had been effortless and he hadn't spent any more time than necessary on it; after their mother had died, no one had seemed to notice when he and his brother just stopped going.

The man rose and struck a series of impossible flexes, each exhibiting an even more ludicrous assortment of sculpted muscles than the last. He supposed he'd read in books before that it was possible for a man's back to ripple, but before this afternoon, Al had never had an image to put to the phrase before.

"You can flex your _latissimi dorsi_ independently?!" he squeaked.

"Countless generations of my family have dedicated themselves to honing their minds, bodies, and souls for the glory of the empire," the man rumbled back. "These muscles bear witness to the years I have spent in service!"

Armstrong beamed and bowed low with yet another grandiose flourish, flexing every inch of said thick back muscles, then rose and contemplated him seriously.

"But physique is not the only thing that must be trained, Alphonse," the man said. "A gentleman's mind and heart require discipline as well."

"And tongue, right?" Al said bitterly. If he'd been more 'disciplined' earlier, he never would have snarled at Rose and driven her away. Because like it or not, regardless of his anger, he needed to know what she had to tell him. And although he didn't know all of it yet, it was clear that the way he'd pressed her – pushed her too far, too fast into territory that he was coming to understand was painful – had become counterproductive. He needed her to open up to him, she owed it to him to open up to him, but if he wasn't more sensitive he would only hurt both of them in the long run.

"I should have watched how loud I was getting," Al said.

"Right," Armstrong said quietly. "Constant vigilance, Mr. Elric. Constant vigilance. But I can promise you this - an outlet does help."

He sat down again and a few beads of sweat dripped off the ends of his fingers to sizzle on the pavement below. Al offered him the remainder of his tea, and Armstrong finished it in a single draught.

"I am sorry that I yelled," Al told him. It was the truth, he could admit that much. "It's just…"

"Hm?"

The man's piercing blue eyes were on him again, endlessly attentive. Gentle. Kind. Al sighed and tilted his head back, squinting up into the fierce Lioran sky.

"It feels like I was set up to fail," he confessed. "I know I've been a pain in the neck, but it's been _two years_! Why didn't anyone just _tell me_ what really happened? Gramma, Winry, Miss Sheska, Miss Rose…probably Master Izumi too…they all just kept saying 'okay, if you insist, go look for him', but the whole time I could tell that they thought Ed was dead. Why didn't they tell me why!?"

"Perhaps they did not believe you were ready to hear it."

"Well perhaps I would have made different choices if I had!" Al snapped. He couldn't help himself. Even talking about the betrayal hurt. Thinking about it made him feel raw on the inside, like he had scoured with sand from the inside out.

"My life is this huge mixed-up jigsaw puzzle and I've been trying to put it back together for years. And now I find out everybody I know has been hiding pieces. Do you know what that feels like!?"

"I am not saying you are wrong to be upset, Alphonse," Armstrong said gently. "I am asking, would it have made a difference if they had?"

And that _was_ the trillion cens question, wasn't it? Without a body, would he – couldhe – still accept that his brother was really gone? That he had given himself for Al? An eyewitness report, an unknown array, but still, all circumstantial evidence. Nothing that amounted to definitive proof. If he had known then what he knew now…all it would have meant was that he would have been even more sickened at the prospect of writing his brother off. Now that he had a clearer picture of what it might have cost to get his body back, he could not conceive of accepting Ed's life in exchange for his. It wasn't fair. It wasn't right.

It wasn't _equivalent._

"No…but not for the reason you think," Al said quickly. Armstrong might be right that nothing could have changed the outcome, but Al would be damned if he went along with this pretense that ignorance was bliss.

"Tell me then, what do I think?"

Al looked up and realized that Armstrong's face could be hard when he wanted it to be. Without his smile the man's face was a sculpture, elegant but set, absolutely inscrutable.

"I've had some…interesting experiences, lately," Al said, staring right back up at that stony gaze with a challenging glare of his own, racking his brain for a way to explain. He could accept sounding crazy, he was slowly growing used to that, but he would never accept sounding defeated. And Armstrong was an alchemist himself - a formidable one by reputation, half-naked statues notwithstanding. If he left out the dreams and focused on the scientific side, maybe this _didn't _sound quite so insane. He had made the mistake of telling Gramma and Winry about the other-self and his dreams, but maybe he didn't have to mention that part. It wasn't so much lying as just…not telling the whole truth, he tried to convince himself.

"You saw last week how I was controlling those armored things, right?" he began. "I made them all start fighting each other."

"I did witness the results," the man said a bit stuffily. "Though not the method."

Al raised his gloved hands to show the array he had embroidered on each palm, a nested circle enclosing a large isosceles triangle, with three smaller isosceles triangles bisecting each side. Aside from those central shapes, they were completely devoid of symbols, a boilerplate for any transmutation he might attempt. Alchemically speaking, i_tabula rasa._ /i

"It was these," he said with pride. "They're my own design."

Armstrong leaned forward to inspect them and his eyes widened. "A blank slate?"

Al nodded. "On the road, you need to do so many different kinds of transmutations…this is the template that's worked the best for me."

Armstrong's blue eyes twinkled and he slapped one knee with a great meaty palm. It echoed like a shot across the small amphitheater.

"Nothing less from the great Alphonse Elric!" Armstrong crowed at him. His cheeks were jubilantly ruddy. "Not many young men your age have created their own multipurpose array! That's quite the accomplishment!"

He gave Alphonse a 'friendly' tap on the shoulder that nearly bowled Al off the bench. Al struggled to right himself, scrabbling a little for purchase on the stone. The man's praise was literally overwhelming and he grinned, feeling hopeful.

"In the process of developing it, I discovered I could transmute parts of _myself_ into things too," he said, a little more hurriedly now. "Like those armors. I was able to move them without an array directly on them all the time because I was _part_ of them. And it's hard to explain, but once I do I can see through it, hear through it – here, give me that tea cup. I'll just show you."

He chanced a look up at Armstrong's expression, hoping the man was still open to the idea. He had advertised his new 'soul alchemy' only a handful of times, and so far it had rarely gone over the way he'd expected. Gramma and Winry had been disturbed by it. His master had forbidden him from even mentioning it in her home. The few others who'd seen it had brushed the miracle off as alchemical rouse. But Armstrong simply nodded and handed him an empty tea cup, and Al's heart started to beat again.

"Watch!" he said and set the cup down on the bench between them. He pressed his palms together, drawing in on himself through the lines of the arrays, and then seized the cup with both hands at once.

As always, there was a rush of noise and a feeling of bright light, a hint of yellow at the edge of his vision. He could feel himself sliding out of his body through his fingertips, like the world around was dilating, closing in on him, but it was only that he was entering the cup, he told himself, the cup _was _his world, and nothing more. Just enough, not too much, he needed to fill the cup but not be contained by it, just enough, a little closer, yes right _there_ -

Al pulled his hands away and stood up, breathing just a little heavier at the eerie sensation of being in two places at once. He was aware of the cup and its dimensions the way he was aware of any of his limbs – where it was positioned in relation to his body, how much space it would take up if it were to be moved to the left or the right.

Armstrong was staring at the cup with an unreadable expression on his face.

"Just wait," Al said, before the man could even speak. He turned and walked halfway around the little amphitheatre, aware at once of the sun's heat on his skin and also the lack of it on the tea cup's porcelain. Its 'face' was open straight up at the sky, its empty well filled with sun instead of liquid, but it did not feel painful to stare at the sun through the tea cup's 'eyes'. It did not feel like anything.

Once he felt he was a decent distance away, Al closed his real eyes again, focused on the ones he had left across the veranda. From the cup's perspective, Armstrong was even more of a giant. His face alone blotted out half the sky. Al concentrated on the atoms in the sides of the cup, the bottom, let his will flow through them and excite them, let that energy spawn off into waves.

_Can you hear me?_ He could hear his voice saying, though the words sounded unnaturally hollow. Echoes, probably, bouncing off the steep walls of the cup.

"Alphonse!?"

Armstrong's moustache spread out like the milky way and day turned to night as the man's face crowded down over his cup-self. Al shifted his attention from sound waves to vibration, starting a ripple of energy in the walls of the cup that made it rattle back and forth.

_Yessir,_ he said again, willing his voice to be there, willing his focus to stay. It was exhausting to throw himself into a body so alien, and he was tired enough from his travels as it was.

_I want you to whisper something to the cup. A word or a phrase, a name, anything.  
_

"Why so?"

_To prove that I'm really there. You can lift the cup if you like, to make sure there is no radio receiver._

The world spun crazily as Armstrong did just that, and he had to fight not to be ill in his physical body. Then abruptly he was righted again, brought up right next to Armstrong's bulbous lips. The man's moustache was so large in his field of vision now that he could see individual pores where the bristles started. It was like a silky wheat field, each yellow hair another waving stalk.

"Dum spiro, spero."

_Doom-spear-oh, spare-oh? What is that, Ancient Xerxian?_ He recognized the cadence of the language but not the words themselves.

"Yes, do you know it?"

_Not that particular phrase. I only know Xerxian as it pertains to alchemy._

Any alchemist worth his salt knew at least that much. The language had been dead for hundreds of years, but modern alchemy had started in that part of the world, so some of its lingo survived. Even today, new discoveries were given honorary names in the Xerxian classification system. If he had a dictionary in front of him, Al could decode a fair bit, but off the top of his head, all he could tell was that Armstrong's sentence had two nouns in it.

"Excellent! It shall make for a fine test then!!!" Armstrong's quivering moustache proclaimed. Up close, his speaking voice was so powerful that Al could 'feel' it vibrate all the way through his porcelain side. His cup-self was aware of it as a change in energies only, nothing more, nothing less, but in his mind he could imagine how loud that would have been in his ear. His physical body winced.

_Yes. Stay where you are, I'm coming back now._

Al turned his mind's eye away from the teacup back to his proper body. Though he was still acutely aware of the part of himself he'd left behind, like an invisible itch he kept needing to scratch, it was no trouble at all to resume using his real eyes. The cup was too inhuman to focus on for long, and seeing from its perspective had felt like being trapped at the bottom of a well with a very wide mouth. If he had stayed there much longer, he rather felt like he would have drowned.

Al crossed the veranda back to where Armstrong was still hanging over the teacup, and activated the arrays on his palms once more.

"Dum spiro, spero," he said triumphantly, and pressed a hand to the cup to reel back in the part of himself that was waiting. Armstrong's applause echoed like gunshot across the little amphitheater.

"Intriguing," the man rumbled. He hoisted the tiny cup up and cradled it in his hands with a tenderness Al would have sworn such massive fingers could not possess. "Does it matter what manner of thing you attach yourself to?"

"It's easier with things that have an obvious point of view," Al said, trying to think how to explain it. "The closer something is to having a human face, the easier it seems to be for me to see through it. Dolls, statues, things like that, I can sustain control longer."

"And suits of armor as well, I take it?" The man had a peculiar look on his face, a strange mix of recognition and resignation. If anything, it was his lack of shock that was shocking.

"Yes," Al said. He took a deep breath. "Last week, I was able to hold on to one of those armors for almost an hour…even after it went through that array. I saw my brother on the other side."

"Other side of what?"

_On the other side of the bruise light_, he thought about saying for some reason, but the words were nonsensical. He discarded them quickly. Soul transmutation was utterly exhausting, but he couldn't afford to show that weakness right now.

"The other side of the array," Al said instead. "Where the armors came from. I don't understand the mechanics, but I think that somehow, somebody's figured out an array that actually transports matter from one place to another. When I came through to the other side, we were inside this huge atrium, and there was an array on the floor, an insanely complex one, at least seven points that I could _see_."

He licked his lips. "I didn't get much time to explore it… the next thing I knew, everyone was shooting."

"Shooting at you!?"

"At my brother. There was a lot of commotion, a lot of uniforms – not ours, I didn't recognize the colors. I picked Ed up with one of the armors." He wrinkled his nose as he realized how strange it must have looked – a hunk of plate metal flailing away like its metal ass was on fire, with Ed hanging on piggyback style. The image felt strangely nostalgic.

"After that, we just…ran."

"And that is everything you remember?"

"Yeah," Al said. "I got him somewhere safe, a bank across a river…and that's something, there was a river! Wherever we were, it was close to a river."

"Did you recognize anything else? Architecture, landmarks, other points of interest?"

Al shook his head. "The buildings were a lot like the historic district in Central, lots of brick, except Central isn't on a river. It was sunset outside, everything was really dusky. If I had pictures I might be able to recognize it, I suppose."

"And have you consulted an atlas?"

"Huh?"

"An atlas, Alphonse. The geography of the known world is well-documented," Armstrong said. He raised one bushy eyebrow. "Would it not be prudent to determine which cities lie upon water? Winnow down the possibilities?"

"I—haven't yet, no." Al's ears burned with embarrassment. Why hadn't he thought of it? Research was supposed to be his forte. He had probably spent half his life in libraries. Every lead about his brother, every new bit of information, he had always tried to treat the way he would an alchemical hypothesis. Collect data, verify, analyze and deconstruct…reassemble into a new whole, a theory based on the knowledge he'd gained. But this past week at home, the only thing he'd been able to think was that he needed to return to Lior, had to get to Lior, above all else. It was not theory, it was fact. Since when had he become so impulsive? When had he ever been so rash?

The arms of the red coat tied around his waist seemed to squeeze even tighter for a moment, and Al shivered despite the blazing heat.

"My first priority was to return to ground zero," Al said. He was aware that he was rationalizing, but that was fine. He could _use_ rational. And there was a good argument for what he had done, he realized, it wasn't that he was jumping to an entirely inappropriate conclusion.

"I want to see the array the terrorists were using before it gets disarmed, and probably classified." And classified higher than his contacts in the government could get him. Higher perhaps than anyone could. He had been through that when he'd researched the original False Rapture. He knew that intelligence had once existed regarding it, because there were multiple documents that referenced 'balloon surveillance photographs' – but when he'd finagled his way into the Central archives, all known copies, along with the negatives, were listed as 'lost' to a suspicious warehouse fire. There _were _images of that.

"What do you intend to do, if you are able to reconstruct this array?" Armstrong asked. His blue eyes were intense, chips of glacial ice peering out from his craggy face.

"Analyze it, deconstruct it. Rebuild it out in the desert, where it can't hurt anyone. If it _is _meant to transfer matter between one place and another, maybe I could send a piece of myself through again, try to figure out where the other end comes out. A marionette maybe, something smallish. If there is an enemy line to break through, a tinier body might be better."

"Hm." Armstrong brought one hand up to cup his face, stroked the pad of his thumb along his moustache thoughtfully.

"And supposing your avatar was unable to return, or heaven forbid, destroyed. Do you know what would happen?"

Armstrong dangled the teacup from his other thick hand. It glinted briefly silver in the sun, a product of its glaze finish.

"Was it a correct observation that you deactivated the transmutation you set upon this vessel? Right now, it does not contain your essence."

It was a statement, not a question, and Al nodded.

"I am not versed in the art of soul alchemy," Armstrong said. He lowered the cup to his lap again, still teasing at the edges of his moustache with his thumb, still obviously troubled. "But I observed your brother manipulate your armored form once, before you regained your body."

"You did?"

"Yes. There was an incident in Central, you and your brother had been assaulted. Ironically, by the very same Ishvarite terrorist who became Lior's bane. Edward's automail was torn asunder, and even your vessel was rent in two by his pagan alchemy. In the aftermath, I was assigned the honorable duty of escorting you home to recuperate."

Al nodded, trying to think, searching for resonance somewhere deep down in the murkiness. Rent in two…he could picture being in two places at once, soul transfer allowed him to do that all the time. But to have a part of himself completely missing, an arm or a leg lost and nonfunctional, it was not something he could remotely understand.

"Define 'in two'?"

Armstrong shifted a little.

"Your chest plate had been torn in half, quite nasty business. It was necessary to ship you as cargo. No one could have believed a living person was wearing you. But," he said, reaching up to swipe sweat off the back of his neck, "your brother assured us you would be quite all right…as long as the array that bound you was intact."

He reached into one of his slack's pockets and withdrew a tiny nubbin of chalk, dwarfed by his sausage fingers. Emergency chalk, most likely, not surprising in the least; it had long been a joke that one had only to turn out a man's pockets to identify an alchemist. The alchemist would be the one with old chalks crushed to powder all over the insides of his clothes. Al watched with interest as Armstrong bent down and began to sketch strong, thick lines in the space between them on the bench.

"This was the array your brother used," Armstrong said. "I have never forgotten it."

He moved his hand away to let Al see, and Al's breath caught in his throat.

"Familiar, is it not?"

For safety's sake, Armstrong had not completed the outer circle of the array, but the form was still obvious. A circle containing four isosceles triangles bisecting each other at equal points around a second inner circle, overall arranged like an eight-pointed star. There were no other symbols. A blank slate array, yet somehow he knew it had only ever seen one use.

_It was RED,_ was all he could think. Red like rust seared into a plate of metal, except it wasn't rust, it was _blood, _and that circle at the center wasn't actually perfect, it had come out more like a squiggle, drawn hastily by a hand whose owner had already been deep in the throes of shock. But that squiggle had been his eye, that squiggle had been his core, and looking down at this gave Al the uncanny terror that if he tried to shift his focus, he would find a part of himself looking back through that little circle even now.

"Alphonse?"

Armstrong was watching him closely, and not at all subtlety, Al realized. A man that size could not just 'happen' to lean into one's personal space without being astonishingly obvious. Al was grateful for his concern though. In the searing noon sun, sweat pouring down his neck and chest, Armstrong smelled vaguely porcine, and just the reek of it was enough to lend gravity to Al's senses again. It was not a pleasant scent, but it was undeniably human.

"…it's like my array," Al summoned his voice. He sounded a good deal steadier than he felt. He wondered if Armstrong could tell. "The components are the same, just arranged differently."

He turned a palm over to compare, traced the embroidery shakily with a finger from the opposing hand. The triangles he had used weren't right triangles, and his array was much more elegant overall, but the process was coded exactly the same – points to all four cardinal domains, fire, earth, wind, and water, with the circle at the center representing ether in both designs. He had designed his blank slate independently, but he had the sickening feeling that were he to replace his array with that other one tomorrow, his soul transfers would work just as well.

"According to your elder brother, your soul itself was affixed with this array," Armstrong said, brushing one a finger along the edge again. "If it had ever been compromised, it would have torn your spirit apart."

"Y-you can't say that for certain," Al said. He had to be logical about this, had to approach it rationally. Analyzing gave him a sense of power, security, it was how he ought to address any problem. "It's never been tested. Ergo, it's never been proved."

"But it has never been disproven, either. And the theory is solid. You were clearly bound specifically to that armor by use of an active array. And now you place 'pieces' of yourself in inanimate objects via the same process. Have you in any way tested what happens if a piece is destroyed?"

"Not…as such, no," Al said, considering. The very idea felt disturbingly distasteful for some reason though. Armstrong spinning the cup with him in it had been bad enough. Trying to imagine being inside something as it shattered made him feel even more ill.

Armstrong frowned.

"By your own admission, you piloted a suit of armor for perhaps one hour's time. But you were unconscious for far longer than that. Might it not be hypothesized that being separated from a piece of your soul had an ill effect on your physical body?"

"It could also have been simple alchemical exhaustion. I've lost control of soul transfers before, but I haven't ever lost a chunk of myself," Al said stubbornly, though privately, his conviction was wavering. Going through that strange array had been the first time he'd ever been substantially separated from a part of himself, and when he _had_ lost his grip on that armor…

_I was in the bruise-light_, he thought again, and shuddered.

"Are you quite certain?" Armstrong mused, looking down at him. His eyes flicked down to Al's coat, lingered there. "Have you a way to measure before and after? How much soul one begins with, how much soul is left? I ask in the spirit of healthy inquiry, of course you understand."

"Of course," Al said, though he felt his hackles rise. Armstrong's formidable bulk was crowding him, even the man's soft smile felt invasive. "And I recognize your concern. I'm aware I need to test the process more thoroughly. For right now, it is merely one option, and much preferable to the alternative."

He plastered a smile on his face and batted his eyelashes as meekly as possible, though again a deep disquiet reverberated inside him. His master had forbidden him to even mention his soul transfers, let alone experiment with them. And for better or worse, until her passing, he had obeyed. He had obeyed much more in general.

"When I saw you in the plaza, last week," Armstrong continued quietly. "I must confess I was alarmed. You remind me eerily of your brother, though not because you are dressed in his guise."

"I needed access to state files," Al began his usual defense, frustrated. It was logical, it _was_, if anyone would listen they would surely understand.

"And this means you must emulate him? Run from your family, leave them to worry? The Alphonse Elric I knew longed to be cared for, appreciated the concern adults have for their children!"

"And I'm not him," Al said. His throat felt tight, raw and painful at the admission. "I can't _remember_ being him."

"Have you tried?" Armstrong's volume increased again. His deep voice cascaded out over the little amphitheatre and boomed back in waves, like the crash of the ocean. Incessant, relentless. "I ask you this because all I have seen is your search for your sibling."

He swept a hand out to touch the fiery cloth cradling Al's sides. "Why not search for yourself as well?"

Al's voice froze mid-protest, trapped between rage and sick recognition. _It's complicated, _he wanted to say, but the words rang hollow even in his own mind. At the core, it was fundamentally simple.

_If I find him, I feel like I will find myself._

But why? What about being Ed's brother – the Fullmetal Alchemist's brother – was so intrinsically appealing? He didn't even know his brother as the Fullmetal Alchemist, only that he owed a life debt to him. That for all his fire and temper, he had apparently done great things. That on record it was always the Fullmetal Alchemist, front and center and smiling. If The Armor was even in the picture, it was silent in the background, a great gray shade haunting him. But staring down at his brother's coat now, his brother's pants, his brother's shoes on his feet, for the first time he saw the inescapable truth.

He was clad in human flesh now, but he was still a ghost.

Armstrong rose and picked up both tea cups. Shook his head at them, but smiled at Al, and that was somehow worse.

"You have lost so much of yourself already. Were I you, I would be more careful to hold on to the parts that you still have."

Armstrong retreated back toward the old chapel, still shining like neon, head up, shoulders back, every bulging inch outlandishly, inexorably, himself.

"…yeah," Al said numbly after the man's shadow. "Sometimes, I miss being me too."

Armstrong paused in the shade of the door. He turned around, one hand still holding the knob.

"But Alphonse, all is not terrible," he said, and his smile this time was a thousand and ten watts. "_Dum spiro, spero,_" the man said, spreading his hands up toward the sky, and in that moment, all his statues paled in comparison. "'While there is yet breath in my body, there is hope in my heart.'"

He leveled his gaze at Alphonse, and the warmth in his eyes made even the desert heat pale in its wake.

"Keep aspira_ting_, and you may yet reach your aspira_tions_," Armstrong said. "Just as long as you remember to live in the meantime."

**

After his conversation with Armstrong, it was hard to contemplate doing anything at all restful, let alone sleep, but Al was in Lior and in Lior, the afternoon meant sun-sleep. The time between two and four was the hottest, most dangerous part of the day, and in the desert, the people had adapted to holing up in the shade and dozing to avoid over-exertion in the heat. All businesses shuttered, even canteen sales ceased, and by the time the two 'o clock bell rang out from the city hall bell tower, the streets were almost entirely deserted.

It begged to mind the question, who stayed awake to work the chimes, but Al had bigger mysteries to solve.

Rose and Armstrong were indisposed herding the children to bed, so Al made himself as useful as he could be while sequestered inside. The orphanage library was well stocked with primers and picture books, but its atlases were too simplistic to be of any use for his quest, though he did smile to see _A is for Alchemy,_ one of his own early childhood favorites. He put in a call to his contacts in Central too but unfortunately to no avail – he had forgotten about the two-hour time difference, which meant that it was still noon back west, and while the state itself might disavow religion, there was no sacrament higher among the ranks than the twelve 'o clock lunch hour. After a brief period of sweating, he finally deigned to leave a message coded with as much information as he dared. The on-call lunch secretary didn't seem to be the sharpest point in the array, either, and probably the best he could hope for was that the man had taken his phone number right.

In absence of anything else to do, Al sought out the bathroom, took a shower beneath a showerhead that looked disturbingly like the Armstrong family rose crest. The water was plentiful and cool though, and he showed his appreciation by transmuting a better softener for it. Aquifer water was unfortunately hard, and without added salts it would reek like sulfur and leave skin feeling gritty. Al swapped the sodium in the ion exchanger for a quantity of potassium chloride, which would both result in less environmental damage and be cheaper to be replaced when necessary. Sylvite, natural potassium chloride salts, existed in surfeit in the surrounding desert.

He left the arrays required for replenishing the modified softener taped to its side in the machine closet and then sought out his quarters, having finally exhausted all other options. At least he felt clean, and although his wet hair smelled a little like bad eggs courtesy of the water, it no longer itched with sweat. Al flopped down on the little cot Rose had set up for him and stripped down to his boxers, laid back on the soft sheets, and tried to think of anything at all that wasn't that array.

Four triangles, two circles. Arcana drawn in blood, both major and minor. All assembled together in an eight-point star. He had never seen that particular arrangement before, but the second Armstrong had said it had been his, he had known it was the truth, as true as sylvite and sulfur, as true as the blood rushing through his veins. Al reached into his battered suitcase and pulled out a piece of paper, sketched it absently, ran his fingers over the lines again and again and again.

Was Armstrong right, that he could lose pieces of himself using these arrays? He _felt_ whole. The few times he had lost control of a soul transfer, he had just opened his eyes back in his regular body a couple seconds later, alchemically exhausted but physically all right. Though if he deactivated the array before that happened, he was always far less worn out. That detail was troubling…but correlation didn't equate to causation. It was also highly likely that he lost control because he'd become tired, not necessarily that the tiredness was caused by a rebound reaction. The man had certainly right about one thing – he needed to test this.

Al dragged his thumb idly over the central focus of the star, considering, and that was when the bottom of the world abruptly fell away.

A flash went off in the back of his head, not in front of his eyes but behind his eyes, and all he could see was a brilliant fuzzy splotch of yellow, like he'd just closed his eyes after staring at the sun. Nothing seemed to change whether he opened his eyes or closed them. Al blinked around in panic, seeing nothing, feeling nothing, not even the bed beneath him. He tried to reach out and feel for the sheets, but his arms didn't seem to move.

_Maybe I'm inside the paper,_ he had the sudden, terrified thought. He'd been thinking about testing it, yes, but he hadn't thought he'd actually activated the array - surely he had better control than that! - but if he thought about it, the ceiling over his cot was made of adobe. In the afternoon light, the off-white clay looked yellow.

_Think, think, have to think, not panic. _It was just a bad transfer, he'd had it happen before when he'd attempted to affix a part of himself to a ceiling. As much as he'd wanted to believe that 'the walls have ears', he'd discovered the human mind rebelled against being trapped in a flat plane. The point of view was too broad, all reference became skewed, and it was easy to panic. Al took a deep mental breath and tried to open the eyes in his true body.

Nothing happened.

He closed his current 'eyes', though the yellow haze remained exactly the same, and concentrated harder, willing himself as hard as he could to shift his view back to his proper self, but once again he looped right back to where he was. It was as if this paper-self was the only self he had. It just didn't just feel like there were two of him.

::but there are, there are two of you::

A voice suddenly _inserted _itself, like an iron curtain dropping down. It was simply there in his mind, without preface or preamble, spoke with his own mental voice but the words were not his. His train of thought had not just been derailed, it felt _hijacked_, and Al had the hideous sensation of something crawling all over him, prickling like bug feet, like invisible centipedes crawling inside his brain.

::two of you, or three of you, many of you, many many many many many many MANY::

Each 'many' grew increasingly louder, more distorted, and the voice became Winry's voice, became Armstrong's voice, became a cat's voice, became a crow's. There was something right outside his field of vision, he was convinced now, something just behind him, and it was watching him…

_Who are you?_ He screamed without words, terrified.

::we are myriad, we are nothing, we are one, we are legion::

There was a feeling of great movement just beyond his reach and a deafening yet inaudible toll, a sound like the inverse of a bell. He thought if he ever heard it again, he might go mad.

_Let me go, leave me be!_ Al gibbered, squeezing his eyes closed, willing himself to see nothing, above all else, hear nothing. Armstrong was right, he was coming undone, his mind couldn't exist like this, he should never have tried to transfer his soul into anything, now he was lost –

"…what in God's name are you doing?"

The Other was hanging in the nothing-yellow in front of him, staring back with a curious expression.

It was a _dream._

Numb relief washed over him so hard he felt he would be sick from it, but in his dream, apparently he was incapable of physically becoming ill. Al realized he was huddled down (if there was such a thing as 'down', in this place) in a ball, arms clutched around his knees in a fetal position. He _had _arms, and legs, and toes and fingers too. When he raised his head, he found that it moved.

"You again," he said tiredly to the other boy. "Alfons—Haydrich?"

"Heiderich," the Other said with a faint tinge of annoyance. "My family name is_ Heiderich_." He pronounced the 'ich' with particular flourish, with a hint of an accent Alphonse couldn't place.

Al laughed, low and relieved. At the moment, he couldn't care less if the man's name were Alphonse Is-A-Doody-Face Fandango, so long as it was his voice talking and not that…other one. That voice had felt like it was reaching into his very soul and turning him inside out.

What was wrong with him that he could even imagine that?

"What are you laughing at?" 'Alfons' asked, looking alarmed.

"Sorry," he said. "Sorry…I was having the worst dream, before this…" And now he was having the best, because here he was again, here they were – himself and the Other, the person who had claimed to be his brother's friend. Someone Ed had _lived_ with.

Someone who knew that city with a river running through it.

Al bolted to his feet, although the emptiness gave no resistance at all beneath his shoes. If not for his Alfons as his reference point, he wouldn't have reason to believe he were standing up at all. Without the other boy in front of him, he could have just as easily unfolded his legs down and he never would have known the difference.

"Where's Ed?" Al asked eagerly. "Where do the two of you live?" He hadn't gotten an answer the last time they had met like this, and this time around he would not be denied. If he only had the address, the city, the country, _something_ he could work with!

"I-I don't know," Alfons stammered, looking deeply unhappy. There was the briefest impression of a hallway behind him, a heavy door that opened and shut in the ether. "I told you, he left."

Because there had been some kind of confrontation, Al remembered with dark fury. Because apparently you _drove_ him out. The world twisted around them, reacting to his thoughts the way it had before, and that same tableau spread out around them, a darkened hallway, stairs. His brother, lying helpless halfway down them. It was a caricature only though, his brother's golden eyes and hair and then a rough slash where Ed's mouth ought to be, hardly any nose; a cartoonish parody of a person. His face couldn't seem to decide whether it was a child's or a man's either, the jaw line kept wavering around the edges, like a picture show reel caught in the projector, flickering back and forth between frames.

'Alfons' gasped audibly and made a sign like an X in the air in front of his body – some kind of ward? It reminded Al of the Ishvarites' sign of penitence – and as he stared, Ed's features came in to stark relief, one second a preimage, the next a complete photograph. Al gaped himself, amazed by how _real_ Ed was, how much he expected him to jump up and start talking. He could even see slight stains on his brother's shirt lapels. Those details hadn't come from him, of that he was certain.

A wave of hot jealousy spiked through his core and he found himself even more furious with the stranger. His hands clenched into fists. He did not understand the mechanic exactly, but he knew the dream seemed to react to things he pictured in his own mind. That was how he had shown 'Alfons' his research data, all the images he had found of Ed. Presumably also how Alfons had shown him Ed's…'girl', an unfamiliar woman who'd appeared Lioran. But if that was the case, and his brother only resolved when Alfons looked at him…in the language of dreams, did that mean that this stranger knew his brother better than he did now? Al had the maddening feeling it might.

He had to focus though, had to focus. If this was anything like the last dream, there might not be much time. He wanted to snarl about it but Alfons's fight with Ed was not the issue. Ed's whereabouts were.

"What is this place?" Al pushed instead. "Where did you last see him? You owe it to him to tell me, people are trying to find him." This Alfons seemed (rightly so) to feel guilty for having hit his brother. Maybe he would actually answer the question this time.

"…it is our boarding house, in Munich," Alfons whispered. He was visibly paler, clutching at the nape of his shirt like the rough fabric was choking him. Not that he had been robust to begin with. In the yellow light he looked jaundiced, and his skin seemed paper thin. It reminded Al eerily of the cadavers at the state research facilities, of illness and of death.

_This is not a well man, _he realized for the first time.

"Where?" Al asked again, feeling a twinge of sympathy, but he i_needed/i_ to know. "Where is Munich? Is there a river there?" Come to think of it, Alfons had mentioned a river the last time he'd seen him. Al had to fight a sense of mounting excitement. This person i_was/i_ real somewhere, he had to be, too many coincidences were starting to add up.

The floor split behind them, sunk down into a small ghostly parody of the river Al remembered…smooth as glass, just a few drifting leaves to suggest the current might be moving.

"The river Isar," Alfons said, sounding confused. He was staring at the vision with something akin to relief though. Apparently he was glad not to look at Edward's face any longer. "And Munich is in Germany."

"Is that a territory name? Or a colony? I've never heard of it."

"No, it is a nation! My fatherland."

That seemed to hit a nerve. Alfons jerked his head back haughtily and his nostrils flared.

"Sorry," Al said hurriedly, though he wasn't sure why he was apologizing. This person had _hit_ his brother, he reminded himself again, he'd admitted to casting Edward out.

"Where is it in relation to Amestris? Is it in Libya or Asias?"

Al concentrated hard and the river disappeared, replaced by a map hanging in between them – the two great continents of the civilized world in bas relief, northern and southern, with jagged marks roughly apportioning the countries whose boundaries he could best picture. Xing hulking to the east, Drachma looming across the north, the scattered smaller nations to the south and west, Creta, Aerugo. Amestris stood out at the center as a glowing landlocked territory.

Alfons was giving him a strange look now, deeply thoughtful. He reached up as though to touch the map, but his fingers stopped just shy of making contact.

"Amestris…?" Alfons said slowly, as though tasting each syllable on his tongue. "Edward used that name."

"Yes," Al said, hardly daring to breathe. "That is where we're from. My 'fatherland'. Ed's too."

"…it's all true, isn't it?" Alfons asked in a raspy voice. His pale eyes were wide, searching Al's face with quiet amazement. "You're i_real/i_."

"Yes," Al said, meeting his gaze as best he could. Alfons had expressed doubt before too, and he hadn't known what to say. "Aren't you?"

"I think so," Alfons said slowly. "Insofar as this is a dream." He tilted his head to one side, appearing to consider, one index finger pressed just to the outside corner of his lips. The effect was so over the top 'THINKING' that Al had to restrain himself from laughing. The man looked like a gangly crane cocking its head over a fishpond, stymied by having a selection. Al had to work to banish the image from his mind before it finished materializing beside Alfons.

"I'm dreaming too," Al offered. "It started out as a nightmare…then I came to be here again, with you."

Alfons's lips twitched down slightly and he frowned. "I was not dreaming of anything else, I do not think. Unless I dreamed the alchemy…" The map between them shifted into the shape of a broom for some reason, then winked out altogether.

"Alchemy!?" Al yelped, darting forward a few steps, hardly able to breathe. Something stopped him before he reached Alfons though. It was as though he were wading into a thick, invisible liquid – the further he went the harder the resistance became, until by the fourth step he couldn't lift his feet at all. Al looked down at his stuck legs in surprise, reached down to try and pull at one with his arms.

Alfons moved forward as well with a curious expression on his face. He took four very deliberate steps before stopping dead himself, cocked his head to the side again.

"We seem to move easier this time," Alfons noted. "But not very far." His tone was clinical, detached, a scientist solidly in observation mode. Al recognized that demeanor well. Sometimes, he even played that part himself.

He was less interested in observing the dream phenomena right now though, not when Alfons had just spoken that tantalizing word.

"What were you saying about alchemy!?" Al pressed again. He let his legs be, concentrated on trying to drill through Alfons's skull with his eyes instead.

"I work for a…society of gentlemen," Alfons said, and was it Al's imagination, or did he seem uncomfortable? He took a shallow little breath, coughed a little before he continued. "Today, they showed me something that I thought was impossible."

The floor beneath them rolled back like a carpet in toward Alfons, then out again in every direction. There were dark circles marked in even intervals across the 'room' they were in now, each a highly ominous shade of black. Like burn marks, or the char from a bad transmutation. And that _was_ their purpose, Al realized with sudden delight, he could see the marks of what was clearly meant to be an array in the circle that was now positioned between them.

"You work for alchemists!?"

Alfons nodded reluctantly. "Apparently this is the case. Apparently…I am one too," he said, and he looked up with a stare so fierce Al nearly laughed again. It was like Alfons expected him to take issue with it.

"You didn't know?" It was unusual, but not inconceivable, that someone could grow up a latent alchemist. Most children were tested by the time they left grade school, but if they were homeschooled, or missed a lot of school for some reason, it was possible to go years without exposure to the discipline. Al had a hard time picturing it himself because he and his brother had had their father's old books; they had read about arrays since the time they were three. By the time his brother was four they'd both already experimented enough to know they had the gift. Not knowing at all was hard to imagine.

"Of course I did not know!" Alfons sputtered. There was color to his skin now, little spots of flustered red on his cheeks. "It is madness. Alchemy is a pseudo-science, no one has taken it seriously for hundreds of years. How could I have been expected to know!"

He seemed legitimately perturbed, a brilliant scowl written all the way across his face. Al blinked. The Ishvarite people disavowed alchemy for religious reasons, of course, but they were at best a 'nation' of nomads. Bush people, whose traditions were immune from modern technology only because of the remoteness of their encampments. Alfons did not look like he was one of the desert peoples. His skin was fair enough to belong to a society girl in Central.

The broom appeared again, spinning in slow circles, and Alfons stared at it with a despondent look on his face.

"Edward told me about alchemy," Alfons said. "When he was drunk sometimes. I thought that he was shell-shocked. The circles never worked when he drew them...the only logical conclusion was that he was ill."

His eyes shone with a sudden brightness and Al shifted uncomfortably. i_This person hurt my brother_,/i he reminded himself again, but the rage was increasingly difficult to summon. Alfons seemed to radiate hurt when he spoke about Edward, like he was genuinely penitent. And it wasn't as though he and his brother had never bowled each other over in a fit of pique. When he was nine he had once thrown his brother down a flight of stairs at the Master's house because Ed had absolutely refused to accept that their sparring match was over. He remembered that afterward, he had felt horrible (and not just because the Master had spanked him).

"What do you mean, the circles didn't work?" Al asked, trying to summon objectivity again. Whatever Alfons's feelings were, he needed the information Alfons had even more.

"Just that, they didn't work," Alfons said. He still looked wretched. "Edward did not know why they didn't either. He drew them everywhere, when he thought I wasn't looking. Once, he even drew them on his bed sheets."

A miniature bed appeared between them in the ether and a tiny Edward jerked out of it, looking incredibly disgruntled. As the vision opened its mouth to rail wordlessly, Al realized there was half an array printed on Ed's cheek, traces of the array that was drawn across its pillow. The image was so powerfully, inexorably i_brother/i _that Al couldn't keep from laughing for a second.

"He does that sometimes," Al explained, and now the Ed in the vision was six again, looking over at a little Al in the bed they shared with the mark of Mercury stamped across his lower chin. "He gets ideas in the middle of the night, can't wake up enough to find paper to write them down."

Alfons blinked for a second, then slowly, he also grinned, shaking his head a little in exasperation. He had a very nice smile, Al realized for the first time. It was the first time he had ever seen it.

"Well, if it weren't for Miss Gracia – our landlady – he would look like a vagrant all the time," Alfons said. "She says she boils and boils his shirts to get the ink out of them."

"That sounds like him," Al agreed. "The master used to have to bend him over the sink and scrub his face for him when he came in from outside, else people would think he was Ishvarite."

He left out the part where she'd also had to do the same for him. Left to their own devices, the two of them had tended to ignore their appearances. Dirt might even be said to build character.

"Where is your boarding house, anyway?" Al asked again, still smiling at the other man. He focused once more on bringing up a map between them. "On a map, I mean. I'd like to come and look for Ed. We haven't seen each other in two years…we've all missed him here at home. _I've_ missed him."

Hopefully, Edward was missing him too. More than once, it had occurred to him that maybe, just maybe the reason his brother had not turned up so far was that he no longer remembered where home was.

Alfons's smile seemed to falter as he looked at the map again, and his pale eyes flicked back and forth between it and Al.

"I can show you, I think…but…"

A small part of western Asias lit up, in the region the ancients had called Europa. It was slightly north of the infamous boot-shaped peninsula of Aerugo - maybe in the contested part of Creta? Al narrowed his eyes at it, trying to commit the location to memory, when suddenly the map exploded with lines.

Unfamiliar borders raced across the western part of Asias – at least he thought they were borders, but none of them were right. If this was correct, there were at least…thirty, maybe forty territories to old Europa, some so small they were barely even visible next to their neighbors.

"What is this?" Al asked, absolutely befuddled.

"Europe," Alfons said, and his eyes were deeply sad. "The Europe that I know, at least."

"I don't understand," Al said, inhaling sharply, although a horrified part of himself was starting to get an idea.

Alfons shook his head a little, reached one finger out to hover over the ghostly map.

"Edward told me once that he was not part of my 'world'," he said quietly. "I always pretended it was just hyperbole."

Al swallowed thickly, reaching out toward the map as well. There was gibbering at the edges of his hearing again and the world was starting to glow brighter.

Alfons's eyes were glowing as he looked at him now, twin sapphires cutting through the increasing yellow haze.

"But now I think, he was not so crazy," Alfons was saying. "His alchemy, his other world, all of it…"

His face was fading away now, obscured by the increasing light, and Al just barely heard him whisper.

"If he is crazy, then I am crazy now too."

Al opened his mouth to speak, to scream, but the sound seemed to congeal in his lungs. Light poured down his throat, thick enough to feel gelatinous, and something – a hand maybe – invisible and strong swiped fingers along the back of his head.

::now you see, now you see::

A cock's voice, his mother's voice, a million dark things at once crowed in triumph, and then the hand holding him twined hard into the base of his ponytail and jerked hard.

The world exploded in light once more, and then Al saw nothing at all.

* * *


End file.
